Who Needs Teachers? Your Textbooks Do

It used to be fashionable to talk about how technology was going to solve all of our educational equity and excellence problems—bringing relevant, high-quality content to all students, scaffolding instruction to meet each student where he or she was, and engaging every student in meaningful learning, even if that student didn’t have access to excellent teachers…or any teachers. Maybe teachers weren’t necessary anymore, we argued. After all, students can reach out to Wikipedia and YouTube and online calculators and so on, to get any bit of information they might need. They can teach themselves! And, with new national standards, everyone will be learning the same things at the same pace, so…problem solved.

Ha, ha! Obviously, none of this has come to pass. Perhaps less obviously, none of it even made sense.

With learning standards stuffed with more content than could ever be taught in 20 years, much less the 12 we’re given, and standardized tests focused on the low-DOK, low-Bloom levels of thinking that computers can easily score, perhaps it was easy for some of us to think that the primary role of the teacher was to disseminate information.

It is not. It never was.

Look at the great teachers of history. We don’t remember Socrates because he told people a lot of things; we remember him because he asked a lot of annoying questions that made people think about things. Teachers do not simply hand out facts; they shape minds.

Please note: I did not say teachers should not provide factual information to students. You can’t ask students to think about literature, history, science, and mathematics if they don’t know any of those things. And Googling a term is not the same thing as knowing something. Neither is reading a textbook chapter.

So, what is the role of the teacher when it comes to using a textbook? School districts spend millions of dollars adopting these things, and school boards all over the country engage in fierce debates about which ones are most appropriate for their students. Occasionally, we learn that a textbook presents information in a way that one group of people or another objects to. Or—worse—we learn that a publisher is presenting information differently in different states, as this recent New York Times story uncovered. Shockingly, we learned that the Texas and California versions of an American history textbook differed slightly in what they chose to include, and how they framed or presented that information—not only because of each state’s learning standards, but also because of the partisan politics that informed both the crafting of the standards and the adoption decision-making criteria of the local school districts. Shocking!

Except…is it? Textbooks are written by actual people, not machines—and some of those people, or their publishers, may have political biases, agendas, and points of view. Some of them may even be hypocrites who care only about making money. This makes textbooks different from every other book ever written…how?

The only way in which this discovery could be truly shocking is if we genuinely believed that textbooks (or any books) were supposed to be completely neutral, objective, and bias-free—that they could and had to tell the single, reliable, uncontestable “truth,” and that all a teacher had to do was assign students to read a chapter and then answer the questions at the end.

That’s nonsense. Every text has an author; every text has a point of view. That’s true even when an author tries not to have a point of view.

This is why, where young people are involved, every text needs a teacher. And every teacher has the right—the obligation, really—to take a stance regarding that text and engage readers in a critical dialogue about it—even if the extent of the dialogue is a single question, like, “How can we know whether or not this statement is true?”

I know: textbooks were never meant to be objects of critical debate. The whole point of a textbook was to take a tremendous amount of complex information, boil it down into bite-sized chunks, and feed it as effortlessly as possible into student brains, much the way a mama bird might chew up a worm before feeding it to her chicks. That’s why textbooks are invaluable if your goal is to cram students full of facts, and insufficient, or even problematic, if your goal is to get students to think. But in this hyper-partisan, fake-news, Russian-bot, deep-fake world, it is critically important to get students to think about the content that is streaming relentlessly into their brains. Even when that content comes from a textbook publisher. In the end, it’s not what the text does that matters most; it’s what you do with the text.

As Clare Basil recently argued, in defense of Classical Education:

This approach requires understanding our nation’s history, not only by reading a list of texts considered crucial to our history, but inquiring after how those texts––the ideas they embody and the movements they give rise to––shift how Americans define themselves as a people.

How can teachers do this? Not by limiting what students read or see based on their own biases; and not by suppressing their own voice and silently feeding text to their students. Teachers can help students start to think critically about what they read, and see, and hear, by asking three little questions—every day, all the time:

1. What do you think?
2. Why do you think it? (in other words, how can you prove that you’re right?
3. Why does it matter?

Or, if you want to get a little more complex, teachers can build critical thinking by doing the following:

• Providing historical and cultural context and perspective
• Demonstrating how to evaluate textual evidence
• Eliciting and challenging student opinions
• Holding students accountable for defending their opinions with evidence
• Introducing new information that supports or contradicts the text
• Teaching students the basics of rational argument, and the rhetorical fallacies that poor arguments make use of.

You can do this with an essay, a novel, a movie, a song. You can even do it with a textbook. You are not obligated to agree with every word a student reads, just because the district paid a lot of money to obtain those words. But you are obligated to engage with those words…especially if you disagree with them.

Look: everything that comes into a classroom, in physical or virtual form, is simply a resource for teachers to use. None of it can take the place of that teacher. Not even if the publisher says it can. Not even if the principal says it must.

Remember at the end of Dirty Dancing (if you’re old enough), when Patrick Swayze says, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner?” and pulls Jennifer Grey out onto the dance floor?

Well, I say: “Nobody puts Teacher in a corner.”

Grab that textbook and kick off your shoes. It’s time to dance.