Lesson manuals

My youngest sister recently wrote on her blog that she has now finished reading the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church manuals. I thought i might as well reproduce my reply to her post here (edited slightly for context), since it seems to fit the general spirit of this blog, even though it’s a bit serious:

The Joseph Smith manual has been my wife’s and my least favorite of the series. We’re not entirely sure why (though it certainly seems that the editors seem to have chosen blander quotes than they needed to, maybe because of the cultural importance Mormons attach to anything Joseph Smith ever said). I think most of our botheredness about it, though, is the editorial insistence to try to shoehorn all the quotes into a chronological “life history of Joseph Smith” framework (even though the quotes aren’t chronological), rather than doing the pure topic-by-topic approach that has worked so well with the others. Maybe church history lessons should be left to church history classes, you know?

I wouldn’t mind seeing the Brigham Young manual redone with the pedagogical lessons learned since then (most particularly, that there’s no reason to be afraid of extended quotes—sometimes it felt like there was no single quote of more than two sentences in the entire Brigham Young manual).

And my favorite in the series so far? The Heber J. Grant manual, which surprised me.