What He Said, Part II: Reading Against the Text(book)

One thing I really appreciate about Burke's quotation from the last post is that teachers are asked, not just generically to bring students into a set process of discovery, but rather into the teacher's own process. Which brings me, in this post, to an interesting question:
How many teachers ever discovered something new by reading about it in a textbook?

Perhaps the answer is many, though much of what my students have learned from my old math and literature books is historical, rather than literary or mathematical. In a sense, this is a return to my Ancients vs. Moderns post, though the stronger argument comes from my students, many of whom have happened to be aspiring teachers. Some with an interest in English have marveled at my eighth-grade reader from 1875, with its selections from Alcott, Coleridge, Thackeray, even a congressional speech from John C. Calhoun. They also start thinking much less of English language instruction today, and what passes for "literature" in our own times. The same opinion seems to hold among my math education students: one in particular tore into my 1905 copy of Advanced Arithmetic, noted the author's qualifications, and wrote a paper on turn-of-the-century debates on American math education. Again, the old appeared favorable to the new, and the modern textbook came up far short of its predecessor.

So, some textbooks are good, not least some old ones. But what of just going without? That was my strategy in college, when to save money I simply refused to buy the textbook, went to the university library, and came out better informed than other students by an order of magnitude. True, I couldn't tell my Balkan History instructor anything that Barbara Jelavich said in her survey text--which really isn't all that bad!--but unlike any other student in the class, I could cite Lord Kinross on the region's history under Ottoman rule, AJP Taylor on the Balkans and Great Power politics leading up to World War I, and Misha Glenny's fantastic book on the fall of Yugoslavia. My British doctoral program didn't even have course work, so the library and the archives became the great mainstays of my learning. And as it became my turn to teach, well… a fluke happened. Being hired three days before the semester started, I had no opportunity to tell the college bookstore what books to order, so I went without. The experiment proved reasonably successful, and I've repeated and improved it ever since.

"Good for you," a skeptic might say, but I was intrigued to see in a recent blog post that a high school teacher did more-or-less the same thing with his physics class, enabling his students to learn without textbooks. Friends from four different education programs have told me that even this experience is far from unique, as inquiry based learning, or IBL, begins to take hold across more of the education world, avoiding the canned information and step-by-step instruction from modern textbooks. Together with my own experience as both student and teacher, I'm led to ask: what happened to the textbook?

I feel like I have the start of an answer in the publishing companies that hawk their wares in the hallowed halls--not of academic classrooms or university bookstores, but of professors' offices. I ask representatives sometimes, "what's so different about this 14th edition of Western Civilization, part II, from edition 13, edition 6, or even edition 1?" The answer, in most cases: 2-3 edited paragraphs in five of the forty-seven essays, a changed sentence or two in four other chapters, a few new footnotes and references sprinkled throughout, a slightly-tweaked index, and one or two new essays reflecting the latest, greatest scholarship on subtopics that my students don't care about. Of course, a brand new copy of edition 14 will cost $150, while a used copy of edition 12 (let alone edition 2) runs about $4.50--and most of that is for shipping.

Below the college level, I shudder to think what gimmicks are at work in local school boards and state boards of education, that again foist new copies on students, with--as I gather from the students I noted above--decreasing standards of quality, at prices that I can only think verge on extortion. As much as I might favor commercial competition, even for state contracts--this is something I see and admire all the time in my research on the rise of the British Empire--something appears seriously wrong here. It's not to say that commercial profit is always about delivering the best product, but when it comes to aggressive marketing and exploiting captive markets… without dismissing all the genuine good that can come from good textbooks and good textbook publishers, something about this particular variety of market manipulation is just plain sick.

I am sure the publishers are not the only ones at fault. No doubt there are others for whom the allure of profit far trumps the value of educated students, classroom by classroom, school by school, district by district, state by state, even country by country. No doubt there is an economics of publishing that I simply do not know, and I would be glad to be enlightened. But if there really is a financial motive here, in giving our children an education that they themselves recognize by their college years is both more expensive and lower quality than it was for their forebears a century ago… is there something not wrong with this picture? Are teachers and students in this situation wrong to want to protest?

And so I return to Burke. I didn't learn history from textbooks. I learned it from lectures and office hours, from libraries and archives, from databases and article collections, and today from sites like google books and archive.org. I also learned it, and still learn it, by communicating with other historians and checking my insight against their expertise. None of this looks like textbook learning. So if I follow Burke--if I want my students to follow in the track of my own discoveries--why would I even start to set them on a different course?