Who needs textbooks anyways?

I think the most interesting thing that I read for our article groups was Elizabeth Moje’s take on textbooks. Although we didn’t really talk about it in our presentation, I kind of wanted to because it really struck me as such a common sense approach to teaching. In an article by Art Peterson, he sums up Moje’s take on textbooks. “Textbooks…[provide] content area teachers with a vehicle for covering vast amounts of information in short periods of time at the expense of the understanding that makes for true engagement. Moje would replace dependence on a single text with the tools that workers in a scholarly field actually use. Students of history, for instance, would have at their disposal a variety of source documents that would help  them construct their own narrative and understandings.” Because according to an article by Judth Rodby, Moje “argues that students’ understanding of how knowledge is produced in the subject areas as is more important than the knowledge itself.”

Students are routinely asked to memorize dates and events and lists and formulas from textbooks, often with the unfortunate consequence of students asking, “When are we going to use this in real life?” or having them promptly forget the information immediately following a test. The information mandated for them to learn has no value to them. Instead, according to Moje, “Learning must be linked to everyday life.” In the first chapter of the book Education Nation, the author Milton Chen dives right into this idea when he says we need to reshape our very approach to thinking about education. He writes about the simple questions that children ask: “Why is the sky blue?” “Who’s the tallest person in the world?” “How do we talk?” “Why do people get sick?” We never address the simple questions we have that really drive our desire to learn. Instead, “learning” has become this static, boring requirement that has children consequently sitting in a classroom for 7 hours a day, not even addressing the questions that make kids curious to learn in the first place. If we utilized Moje’s approach, with Chen’s ideals in mind, teaching could become much more hands-on and beneficial, not to mention fun. Use more primary source material. Explain why the kids have to learn this, why it’s beneficial, how the people in the field use the information, how they come up with the information, and have them learn what Williams suggested in his article: Learn for what context you are reading and writing, and act accordingly. This is the key to success. And I believe this is the key to interest in learning, because it then becomes beneficial to the kids learning it.

Pretty much my favorite video in the whole world right now is this one. It captures much of the frustrations that I experience with the education system, and I think all its points are spot-on. Kids need to be emotionally involved in school; it needs to be “exciting, challenging, and vivid,” according to Chen, not a place where we anesthetize our kids to try to get them to “focus” in a classroom when we live in such a visual and engaging world that is constantly clamoring for their attention through media and technology. School has become boring. It has lost its ability to teach and has instead adopted a facade of academia through standardized test results. School needs to be about learning again, being a hands-on place where kids can explore the things that make them curious about what they “see, feel, and touch every day” (Chen). So instead of having kids memorize the dates of the American civil war, have them read personal letters, re-enact battles, have them understand how and why the author of a textbook wrote the information they did, and get a deeper understanding and appreciation for a subject that is mandatory. I sure would like school a whole lot better if that’s how it was run.

Another thing that stood out to me was our groups book experiment where we asked everyone to pick a book and then divided them up into genres. I found it interesting, that similar to our infatuation with textbooks, schools also seem to have an infatuation with the classics. I noticed that unless you are the amazing Kim Jaxon and use alternate texts, the only texts lauded in the classroom are the classics. And yet we have 5 out of 6 tables filled with students who would readily read other genres. Are they not beneficial as well? Do they not also have rhetoric and morals and excellent plot lines and twists and every other thing that the classics possess. Granted, some to a lesser extent, but also in some cases to a higher extent. For example, if the rap song “Affirmative Action” could be picked apart by undergrad English majors for its rhetorical devices and complex meanings, then I think that genres other than the classics have something to offer the classroom. And seriously, then we wouldn’t be excluding 5/6 of the people in the class! Imagine that.