Textbook Errors: How the World is Moving Too Fast for Education

Additionally, textbooks convey a world view deemed appropriate by politicians, so young people acquire an image of reality as shaped by their predecessors.The real world is much richer than that, however. Students need a more diversified set of stimuli and possibilities which can match the way they experience life. The time has come to make a change so that future generations can learn to create the best world for themselves.

A vast majority of people associate school and learning with textbooks. The learning materials already become commonplace in kindergartens and become bound to children over the course of their entire education. Kids initially perceive them as a distinction—a key to the adult world. However, older pupils begin to notice that textbooks are actually a burden. Knowledge, skills and attitudes can be developed in hundreds of ways using little more than a smartphone. Today, all that textbooks really do is become a burdensome load on students’ backpacks.

Textbooks: The Root of All Evil?

The textbook is the adults’ favorite instrument of torture. It provides teachers with a ready set of mandatory content which students should learn. Chapters followed by questions make the job even easier. Need a homework idea? Tell your students to answer the questions and you’re all set. Alternatively, the same questions can be used in the classroom: students first read the relevant passages and then analyze the matters formulated by the textbook author. In this case, all you need to do is tell them which pages to study, and the lesson proceeds by itself.

Parents love textbooks too, and sometimes that love is pain. This especially concerns exercise books, where the “love for books” demands that every single exercise be done. Skipping exercises is perceived as robbing the people who have bought those resources. After all, it’s the school that instructs parents which books they must purchase for their children. Moreover, they pay for an entire book, not for selected pages, and buying used items to lower the costs doesn’t work with exercise books for obvious reasons. Consequently, it’s logical that a new, fully paid-for book must be studied in full, right? No skipping allowed—especially as far as gap filling exercises are concerned. As mentioned above, parents are prepared for such practices starting from their kids’ kindergartens. Publishers offer special sets for three-year-olds so that they can “learn” to read, count and do whatever else school teaches students. Good kindergarten teachers can certainly make great use of such books, but most of those publications instill mechanical behavior patterns. As a result, children are duly occupied, but not necessarily to the benefit of their true education or development.

Stop Them in Their Tracks

Poor use of school textbooks solidifies the learning mechanism referred to as following the track. This happens when a teacher treats the content package included in a book as the key set of information to be acquired by their students. Sadly, similar methods strongly limit a student’s thinking. Imposed content, together with a ready-made interpretation and a set of consolidating exercises, narrows down the range of viewpoints and forces young people to comply with their teacher’s instructions thoughtlessly. The problem intensifies where the textbook is the only source of information offered in the classroom. Focusing on the work with textbooks contributes to the elimination of cognitive curiosity from the learning process—and where curiosity is missing, motivation vanishes too.Even worse, students receive a message that nobody cares what they care about; they are simply supposed to learn what the book says. Unfortunately, information on paper is becoming obsolete in today’s world. Neil Postman, an American philosopher, media theorist and cultural critic, highlighted that phenomenon already back in the 1990s. Consequently, he put forward a radical conception suggesting that school textbooks be abandoned entirely. In his opinion, they are an enemy of learning as an instrument of dogmatism and content trivialization. All they do is save the teachers time and effort, but the time and effort imposed on the students as a result soon becomes their torment and curse.

According to Postman, textbooks in general (and their content in particular) have a hidden purpose of promoting narratives aimed at imposing a specific viewpoint selected by the authors. An especially telling example of this phenomenon in Poland is Wojciech Roszkowski’s textbook for a new school subject called “History and the Present.” Foreign-language textbooks also provide evidence of imposing a chosen world view on students. A highly specific selection of content can be found, for instance, in the Solution student’s book series published by Oxford University Press. The main authors, Paul A. Davies and Tim Falla, are thoroughly educated researchers who know the reality of the contemporary world. However, this doesn’t prevent them from hiding social, civilizational or climate-related problems in their texts. In both cases, the goal is the same: showing the world as seen by the textbook authors, not the world as it really is. Ultimately, the provided narrative is anticipated to become the students’ way of describing, identifying, analyzing and evaluating the reality that surrounds them.

Bidding Textbooks Farewell

Naturally, a more modern approach to textbooks does exist and was already promoted by Célestin Freinet, the creator of Modern School Movement. Freinet put forward methods based on free exploration of the world by children in combination with creative activities. In his work, he strove to demonstrate the key role of learning based on children’s experiences—both positive and negative. “We should let children experience groping, extend their roots, experiment and drill down, find out and compare; we need to let them go on voyages of discovery—sometimes hard, but allowing them to find the food which will be useful for them,” he argued. Consequently, he developed pedagogical methods which underpin the organization of both the teacher’s work and the pupils’ activity. They are still applied today and include:

• free writing,
• self-correcting files,
• school correspondence,
• class journals,
• free plastic, musical and theatrical expression,
• field investigations.

To complement those, Freinet devised a set of working methods: group-based trial and error work (inquiry-based learning), encouraging children to learn by providing services or creating products (pedagogy of work), cooperative learning, and authentic learning by using the children’s real experiences (the natural method). He also believed that children take responsibility for their own work from the first years of their lives. Regarding teaching, he criticized the traditional education systems for not giving teachers the room to be innovative.

A hundred years later, digital methods are entering into schools. Mitchel Resnick from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a piece of software called Scratch (the current version is Scratch 2.0). Launched in May 2013, the program enables children to create and share interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations. As they do that, they learn a programming language, which offers benefits similar to those of writing: it is a great tool to structure thoughts, identify mistakes, build problem-solving strategies, and transfer ideas. As Resnick has found out, children don’t learn first and act later. Instead, they pick up an activity and then learn how others have done it because they want to be better. Therefore, a society willing to shape creative and clever students should first and foremost provide them with tools ensuring wide application potential as well as arrange educational situations which encourage experiments, design, and creation.

Solutions which abandon traditional textbooks are supplemented with specially developed and shared digital collections of educational resources. One of the most popular resources of this kind is definitely the Khan Academy, established in 2006 by Salman Khan—a graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its mission is to provide free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The interactive practical programs, articles and videos help students be successful in any subject. The key principles followed by Khan Academy include:

• personalized learning: students practice at their own pace, first filling in gaps in their understanding and then accelerating their learning;
• trusted content: created by experts, the Academy’s library covers verified practice and lessons available to teachers and students alike;
• tools to empower teachers: with Khan Academy, teachers can not only find information packages, but also identify gaps in their students’ understanding, tailor instruction, and meet the needs of every student.

Nowadays, the number of similar platforms is growing. They attracted particular interest in the period of remote learning forced by the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Society has quickly picked up on the opportunities offered by those tools, such as out-of-school education enhancement, personalized learning processes, and a supply of richer content and more diversified working methods. This breaks the mandatory track which students (and, at least partially, teachers) have had to follow by complying with centrally imposed ideas, interpretations and activities. True, the new order may hinder the control and enforcement of obligatory knowledge, but it will certainly contribute to student creativity and innovation.