Talking Ed: Can schools ditch textbooks?

A puzzle begins

When it comes to textbooks, I believe it is the collective memory of many people. From fluorescent lines to doodles, numbers and notes. I know many friends around me, and I have the habit of cherishing textbooks. I even joked that I want to keep it as an antique for my children and grandchildren. Together with the "criminal evidence" of distracted illustrations in the classroom, it will be passed down from generation to generation.

In the video age where pictures are better than words, and pictures are better than pictures, it is not unreasonable to believe that textbooks will become historical objects: the content is closed and inflexible, the words are too many and the pictures are too short, and it is difficult to compare with the colorful world of the Internet, especially The speed of the Internet is increased to 5G, and the video conference is not difficult at the moment, coupled with the environmental protection advocacy of paperless (Paperless). It is not difficult to understand the "flipped-classroom". This idea that appeared in the 1980s has been repackaged into a trend of education reform and regarded as the terminator of textbooks.

However, looking at the development trajectory of textbooks over hundreds of years, it seems that it is not as simple as imagined to shake off this seasoning.

From tool to function

As a teaching tool shared by teachers and students, textbooks have multiple characteristics: acting as an endorsement of knowledge, related to the vital interests of students (exam content), and even as a medium for parents to interact with their children.

This function has been strengthened day by day, which is not unrelated to the self-completeness of textbooks: supporting question books, PPT, and answer manuals, teaching, learning, and evaluation are organically bundled together. For some novices, it is simply a gift.

Of course, the transformation of the role of teachers since the Industrial Revolution cannot be ignored: teaching, class management, student counseling, and administration from the development of discipline to the present, as well as the social reformer described by P. Freire (1921-1997), The "daily" work of a teacher was unimaginable a hundred years ago.

And it is precisely because the function of textbooks has been strengthened that reducing the time for "preparation" and freeing up more time for "administration" is regarded as the norm. The extreme development of this paradox is to allow textbooks to specify in detail the teaching steps, the way of motivation, and how to conduct multiple assessments. In recent years, some Taiwanese booksellers have included common jokes in their textbooks as reference materials, which have been favored by some teachers.

This phenomenon has been tacitly approved under the educational thought dominated by human resources and economic efficiency: teachers' teaching behavior should be consistent and reproducible, and there will be no statistically significant differences between people. The teaching behavior has an ideal model, which takes the teacher as the leading art of the teaching curriculum, and allows the teaching suggestions compiled by the expert team. It is reasonable and reasonable in the teaching context that emphasizes objectivity, efficiency and effectiveness. The textbook can be used as a handbook to achieve this model. It can narrow the distance between teachers' teaching behavior and rational model.

The ideal balance of market and politics

In fact, the wishful thinking of the industry alone cannot make textbooks stand firm in the information age. After all, teachers have a high degree of teaching autonomy in the classroom: they can freely control whether they need seasonings, how much they drop, and even if they buy them. The political benefits hidden in textbooks have prompted national and regional governments not to ignore them: the description of race in American textbooks, the ambiguity of modern warfare between China and Japan, and the selection of gender in Taiwanese textbooks, we can see the struggle between political parties and political groups. As a tool for ideological transmission, textbooks have an innate advantage: the target is the future owners of a region or country.

At the same time, booksellers can naturally understand that they have the ability to control the overall situation. Under the huge market effect, how to get the attention of the government, schools, and teachers has become the primary task. The follow-up service has become a selling point. But while catering to the needs of "consumers", the government, as the biggest "boss", naturally understands that booksellers can't ignore one or the other. Taking the United States as an example, although the publishers Pearson and McGraw-Hill have different views on disputes over the Civil War, religion, race and class, the version that finally falls into the hands of teachers and students is the consensus value of the government and market enterprises. Lowen (JWLoewen, 1942-), Aldibach (Altbach, PG, 1941-) have studied this in detail and can be called a classic.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, started to formulate the "Basic Guide to Quality Textbooks" as early as the millennium. The content, design, layout, and teaching activities of textbooks are all set within a limited framework. Strong, through the gradual establishment of a school textbook submission mechanism, the free-oriented market model can be brought closer to the scope of government supervision.

Seasoning: Fall? not fall?

As global conflicts intensify, it is natural that the United Nations will not lose sight of the importance of textbooks. Use textbooks to convey the mainstream value of "consensus" through the existing voice , democratic spirit, universal values, etc. need to be the main axis of content, rather than nationalism in the narrow sense. Following the warming of geopolitics, the future development of textbooks will only gradually shift from "national" to "international". Whether or not various ideologies can be rationalized and the disputes over textbooks' "sovereignty" can be effectively resolved in the process will affect the development and fate of textbooks.

The advent of big data has impacted the status of textbooks, and the answer is obviously yes. Following the transformation of social development, the adjustment of learning mode is inevitable. Individualized teaching, virtual learning, and somatosensory learning are believed to become the mainstream of teaching in the future. "Development" will be implemented in the future in response to the advancement of science and technology. Under this trend, will textbooks be phased out naturally according to the times, or will they be self-adjusted and transformed into another tool for maintaining class? In the learning age of the "Chur" culture, the seasoning may still be easy to throw away.

"Teaching" the Classics: Ideology and Textbooks

American scholar Michael Apple (1942-) believes that the content of school courses and textbooks is never neutral "knowledge", but a "value orientation" deliberately selected by a specific class, and finally falls into the hands of teachers and students. This book is already the "result" after the game of various interest groups, and the purpose is to reproduce and rationalize the class; and the " Ideology and curriculum " published by him can be regarded as a classic introductory work in this field. .

This article has been published in the Macau Daily News