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The modern school textbook

A teaching aid became a portable curriculum

ANTIQUITY

Teaching texts

Handwritten texts supported privileged learners and teachers.

15TH CENTURY

Print reproduction

Printers reproduced the same instructional content at greater scale.

1658

III

Orbis Pictus

Comenius joined images and bilingual words for children.

19TH CENTURY

Mass schooling

Graded books aligned lessons with subjects, curricula and citizenship.

Printing made educational content reproducible. School systems made it standardized and authoritative.

Sources: Georg Eckert Institute (2017); Library of Congress (n.d.); University of Minnesota (n.d.)

Educational texts existed in ancient Greece, but handwritten texts remained scarce and largely accessible to privileged learners. From the fifteenth century, printing allowed authors and publishers to reproduce the same instructional material for larger numbers of students. Printing and the institutionalization of school education together established the textbook as a central educational medium in European schools.

Comenius's Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in Latin and German in 1658, became one of the earliest widely used illustrated textbooks. It integrated words and pictures, extending instruction through the learner's visual senses. During the nineteenth century, expanding mass-school systems increasingly organized textbooks by subject and difficulty. The McGuffey Readers, first published in the 1830s, combined graded literacy instruction with lessons about morality, work and citizenship.

The textbook developed through a network of authors, publishers, printing technologies, governments, curriculum authorities, teachers and learners. It did more than support a curriculum. In many classrooms, it helped determine what the curriculum was and how teachers delivered it.

References:

Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute. (2017). History of the school textbook. https://research.gei.de/en/publications/history-of-the-school-textbook/

Library of Congress. (n.d.). 1800 to 1850: Books that shaped America. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/books-that-shaped-america/1800-to-1850.html

University of Minnesota. (n.d.). Orbis Sensualium Pictus lecture. https://iconics.cehd.umn.edu/OrbisSensualiumPictus/Lecture/default.html

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McLuhan's tetrad of the textbook

ENHANCES

Sight, memory and reach

Knowledge becomes visible, repeatable and portable.

OBSOLESCES

Exclusive dependence on presence

Instruction can continue without the teacher in the room.

RETRIEVES

The storyteller as cultural memory

An authoritative voice returns in stable, silent print.

REVERSES

Stable knowledge becomes frozen authority

Reliability can harden into conformity and dependence.

TEXT

BOOK

McLuhan & McLuhan (1988, Chapter 3)

For McLuhan and McLuhan, every artifact extends human faculties. The textbook extends the eye through printed language, diagrams and illustrations. It extends memory by storing knowledge outside the human body. It also extends the teacher's or author's voice across time and geographical distance.

The textbook does not eliminate teachers. It reduces exclusive dependence upon their physical presence, individual memory and variable oral explanations. It retrieves an older function once performed by storytellers, elders and teachers: carrying cultural memory across generations. However, it remakes that voice as silent, visual and repeatable.

When extended too far, the textbook's stability reverses into rigidity. Guidance becomes authority, preserved knowledge becomes frozen knowledge, and external memory can produce dependence upon the book. Learners may begin treating its representation of knowledge as knowledge itself. The four effects operate simultaneously rather than as a chronological sequence.

References:

McLuhan, M., & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science, Chapter 3. University of Toronto Press.

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The textbook as a delegated teacher

What must humans do when the textbook is absent?

EMBODIED TEACHER

Can become tired, ill, distracted or pressed for time

Can also notice confusion, improvise, encourage and care

TEXTBOOK

remembers

repeats

sequences

waits

delegation

Reliability gained

Responsiveness lost

Latour (1992)

Latour asks us to understand a nonhuman actor by imagining the work humans would need to perform in its absence. Without a textbook, teachers must remember, organize, repeat and preserve instructional content themselves.

Teachers have bodies and lives. They can become sick, tired, distracted, demotivated or pressed for time. They may explain something brilliantly to one group and poorly to another. They may speak too much, lose track of time or unintentionally allow their preferences and biases to shape instruction.

The textbook accepts selected delegated responsibilities. It stores information, repeats the same explanation, sequences material and remains available outside school hours. Learners can revisit it or close it whenever they choose.

Delegation always involves a trade-off. A textbook cannot notice confusion, change its explanation, offer a pep talk or communicate personal goodwill. The teacher's variability can produce unreliability, but it also makes responsiveness and care possible. The textbook does not replace the teacher. It redistributes teaching between human and nonhuman actors.

References:

Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 225–258). MIT Press.

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The textbook prescribes teaching

Authority emerges from a network

TEXTBOOK

chapter order

headings

review questions

Curriculum

authority

Author

Publisher

Page design

Examination

system

Teacher

Learner

Classroom

routines

Sequence, emphasis and assessment are prescribed back to teachers and learners.

Latour (1992), Johnson[Latour] (1988)

The textbook does not act independently. Its authority emerges through relationships among authors, publishers, curriculum authorities, examination boards, teachers, students, paper, print, illustrations and classroom routines.

A curriculum authority authorizes certain knowledge. A publisher turns it into a reproducible and marketable object. Page design directs attention through headings, bold terms, illustrations and summaries. Examinations reinforce the book's authority by assessing knowledge organized according to its categories.

The textbook prescribes behaviour back to teachers and students. Its chapter order suggests what teachers should teach first. Its page divisions influence pacing. Its review questions identify what students should remember. In my own experience teaching Islamic Studies in Pakistan, the relationship between textbook content and examinations could make particular interpretations appear settled and necessary even when teachers knew that the topic contained greater complexity.

ANT makes this distributed action visible. No single author, teacher or textbook controls the outcome. The network collectively produces the textbook's educational authority. This provides a specific example of Latour's claim, “what defines our social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by nonhumans” (Johnson [Latour], 1988, p. 310).

References:

Johnson, J. [Latour, B.]. (1988). Mixing humans and nonhumans together: The sociology of a door-closer. Social Problems, 35(3), 298–310.

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When the textbook becomes a thing

MATTER OF FACT

This is what students must know.

Bounded • stable • authorized

MATTER OF CONCERN

Who selected it?

Who authorized it?

Whose knowledge disappeared?

Gathered • disputed • unfinished

Media ecology examines the environment the textbook creates.

ANT traces the associations that allow it to act.

Latour (2005); Lum (2000)

Latour distinguishes an object from a thing. An object appears bounded, stable and independent. A thing reveals the people, institutions, technologies, attachments and controversies gathered around it.

A textbook appears as a matter of fact when it presents knowledge as complete, neutral and indisputable. It becomes a matter of concern when teachers, students, parents, governments and communities begin asking who selected that knowledge, whose interpretation became authoritative and which voices remain absent.

Latour argues that a thing brings people together because it divides them. A disputed history or religious textbook demonstrates this especially clearly. The apparently simple book becomes a public issue involving authorship, national identity, curriculum policy, evidence, representation and power.

Media ecology and ANT therefore speak to each other. Media ecology asks how the textbook reshapes the larger educational environment and ways of knowing. ANT traces the particular humans and nonhumans whose relationships allow it to act. Media ecology provides the environment, while ANT reveals the associations operating within it. Both frameworks also conceal something: media ecology can become too environmental and ANT can become so fine-grained that broader histories of colonialism and institutional power recede from view.

References:

Latour, B. (2005). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or how to make things public. In B. Latour & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (pp. 14–41). MIT Press.

Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology. New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367375