Description
To the student
This is a new kind of textbook. Most social studies texts you have read in the past contained information about a particular subject, like American history or geography. The texts were written by one or two authors who organized their material into chapters, each with an important theme. There were numerous illustrations in the form of pictures, graphs, tables, and charts. You read or examined this material to learn the facts and generalizations it contained.
Instead of twenty or thirty chapters written by one or two authors, this text has sixty readings. Each reading contains at least one piece of source material, taken from a newspaper, magazine, book, government document, or other publication. The piece of source material is preceded by an introduction, which links one reading with another, and by study questions, which will alert you to important points and issues in the source material. Within the source materials, bracketed definitions and explanations appear after unfamiliar terms and references.
You will not find many illustrations in this text, but filmstrips, a recording, and transparencies for the overhead projector have been provided for use with many of the readings.
Both the written and the audio-visual materials have been chosen with great care. These materials have been designed so that instead of merely memorizing facts and generalizations, you will identify problems, develop hypotheses, or tentative answers to questions, and draw your own conclusions from factual evidence. Throughout your course in Comparative Political Systems, you will be challenged to think for yourself and to make up your own mind.
Most students are able to study one reading in this text for each night’s homework assignment. Because most classes meet from seventy-five to eighty-five times a semester and there are only sixty readings, there will be days when no readings from this book are assigned. Your teacher will find a variety of things he wishes to do on those days. He may wish to give tests, to assign supplementary readings, to analyze local or state government, to study current events, or to hold individual conferences with students to discuss their work in Comparative Political Systems.
During mankind’s history a great variety of political systems has developed. This course concentrates on three types: The political system of a primitive tribe, a modern democracy, and a modern totalitarianism. There are many other kinds of political systems, and, of course, it is impossible to study every kind in just one semester. But in a semester you can learn how to approach the study of a political system. You can develop the tools that you need to analyze any political system at any time or any place.
We welcome you to an exciting adventure: the study of the ways in which different men solve similar political problems.
Hardcover, 299 pages. In very good pre-loved condition.