Paradigm, No. 3 (July, 1990)

My purpose, today, is to give some time to a question that, presumably, most of us have thought about (e.g. Michael, 1990). In my case, the question 'What is a textbook?' arose as an adjunct -- or footnote -- to my work on schooling (see Hamilton, 1989, p. 51, note 46). Conceptually, I did not find it difficult to identify textbooks, like curricula, with the organization and conduct of schooling. But, as many educationists have discovered, it is much easier to locate a phenomenon in logical space that it is to locate it in historical space. In other words, could I find any evidence for my supposition? When, for instance, did the textbook appear?

But even this empirical problem cannot be addressed until a definition can be offered for the term ‘textbook’. What follows, then, is a brief report of my own efforts at grappling with this problem -- an issue that, as far as I can tell, has received scant attention from recent educationists.

Perhaps the fundamental conceptual problem is to find a way of distinguishing textbooks from schoolbooks. Not surprisingly, my own stance is that textbooks visibly reflect pedagogic considerations. That is, a textbook is not just a book used in schools. Rather, it is a book that has been consciously designed and organized to serve the ends of schooling.

To this extent, then, textbooks are organically linked to the changing circumstances of schooling. Indeed, it should be possible to 'read off' forms of schooling from the textbooks that accompany then.

My thesis is that textbooks had their origins in the 16th and 17th centuries. Yet, even these developments were foreshadowed by earlier changes in the layout of books, discussed by Rouse and Rouse (1979), and in the later organization of dictionaries, compendia, bibliographies and encyclopedias of the15th and 16th centuries (see, for instance, Strauss, 1966, Fischer, 1966 and Grafton & Jardine, 1986). In fact,

however, many of these early changes in the organization of books were not intended to serve pedagogic purposes. Rather, they were intended to make texts more accessible to their regular users/owners (e.g., preachers).

Meantime, important changes occurred in the organization of schooling. Grafton and Jardine, for instance, suggest that a 'generalized humanist curriculum' emerged in the early-16th century based on an 'ideology of routine, order and, above all 'method' (p. 123). And, as I have proposed elsewhere (Hamilton, 1990, pp. 25-28), the 16th-century obsession with method brought an unprecedented orderliness to teaching.

Perhaps the most significant figure in this transformation was Peter Ramus (?1515-1572). Ramus capitalized on earlier thinkers (e.g., Rudolph Agricola, 1444-1485) who, according to Grafton and Jardine, had given considerable attention to the organization of knowledge according to 'common places' and 'topics'.

These identified the key notions or headings that assisted the structuring of different forms of discourse (e.g. lectures, sermons, obituaries). Henceforth, elaborate systems of common places prepared by Agricola and his disciples (e.g., Erasmus) provided 16th-century schoolteachers with models that might be followed in their own teaching.

Ramus' subsequent contribution, it seems, was to cluster related topics in the form, quite literally, of a branching taxonomy. Further, Ramist specialization of knowledge was also greatly assisted by the new technology of moveable-type printing (see, for instance, Eisenstein, 1979 and Ong, 1958).

The idea that logical maps could aid the teaching of any field of inquiry was a new ang powerful idea in the16th century. Such maps offered a rational solution to both the 'what?' and the 'how?’ (or sequence) of teaching. As Grafton (1981, p. 47) has maintained, the Ramist approach to the mapping of knowledge furnished students with a 'universal skeleton key' which, if, 'properly applied' could unlock any of the arts and sciences. Overall then, Ramus fashioned a new apparatus that, so he believed, would bring a new 'order' -- and absolutism -- to the pedagogic armoury of university-trained school teachers.

Indeed, one of the most extensive displays of Ramist maps, together with one of the earliest uses of 'curriculum’, occurs in the Professio regia (1576), a compilation prepared by Thomas Fregius of Basel. And a similarly exhaustive display of Ramist maps was offered in the Encyclopedia (1630) of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638) of Herborn Academy (Germany). Alsted was a follower of Bacon (1561-1627) as well as Ramus, combining the different thrusts of their work. Thus, Alsted's maps were not merely a reflection of the state of knowledge (cf. Ramus); they were also believed to be isomorphic with the real world (cf. Bacon). In short, Alsted had a ‘natural history' (or essentialist) view of knowledge. Maps and taxonomies of the world were assumed to be isomorphic with the natural world (see, for instance, the discussions of Rief, 1969, and Slaughter, 1982).

Alsted's place in the history of education is assured -- largely because he is celebrated as a teacher and mentor of John Amos Comenius (1592-1670). But, in the context of this paper, he is worth remembering for two other reasons. First, because his Encyclopedia also contains the word 'curriculum'. And, secondly, because it also devotes a section to 'didactics'.

Here, unfortunately, I am getting even further out of my depth. On the one hand, I do not have access to the ideas of this part of Alsted's work, largely because it is in Latin); and on the other hand, I do not adequately, appreciate the meaning and cultural significance, in Europe, of the term ‘didactics’. Nevertheless, Alsted's historical location leads me to propose that not only did he accept that there was an 'natural' relationship between 'words' and 'things' (cf. the French title -- Les Mots et les Choses - - of Foucault's The Order Of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1970) but also that there was a natural order in the sequence of things.

To conclude, I have suggested that the. design and organization of instructional texts owes much to an assumption -- derived from Aristotle -- that knowledge could be mapped and ordered according to 'nature'. Further I have also suggested that this assumption not only underpinned textbook design, it was also central to the emergence of curriculum and didactic thinking. Indeed, I would even go so far as to propose that, in these terms, the 17th century was the golden age of textbooks, curricula and didactics.

There is a coda to this story. As Mary Staughter and, to a lesser extent, Patricia Rief have put it, the rise of modernist essentialist taxonomies was also succeeded by their 'fall' (Slaughter, ch. 9). Philosophically, scientifically, socially and otherwise (writes Mary Slaughter, p. 189), by the end of the century conditions were not what they had been earlier. By the Revolution of 1688 developments in atomistic mechanistic philosophy challenged and ultimately triumphed over the paradigm of Aristoteian physics.

The organization and rationality of textbooks (and curricula) was never the same again. Perhaps, therefore, post-modernism in educational thought began somewhat earlier than is currently supposed.

Eisenstein, E. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1979.)

FischeT, H. 'Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) as bibliographer and encyclopedist'. The Library, 21, No. 4 (1969), pp. 269-281.

Grafton, A. 'Teacher, text and pupil in the Renaissance classroom; a case study from a Parisian college'. History of Universities ,1 (1981), pp. 37-70.

Grafton, A. & Jardine, L. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Europe (Duckworth, 1986).

Hamilton, D. Towards a Theory of Schooling (Falmer Press, 1989)

Hamilton, D. Curriculum History (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1990).

Michael, I. 'Aspects of textbook research'. Paradigm, No. 2 (March, 1990), pp. 5-7.

Reif, P. 'The textbook tradition in natural philosophy 1600-1650'. lournal of the History of Ideas, 30, No. 1 (1969), pp. 17-32.

Rouse, R.H. & Rouse, M.A. Teachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus Florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1979).

Ong, W. J. Rarnus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (London: Harvard University Press, 1958).

Slaughter, M. M. Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Strauss, G. 'A sixteenth century encyclopedia: Sebastian Munster's Cosmography and its editions'. In C. H. Carter (ed.) From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingly (Cape, 1966), pp. 145-163.

 

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