Paradigm, No. 25 (May, 1998)

I have been asked to introduce the work of the Colloquium to those of you who are joining us for this meeting and to freshen up the hopes of those who are familiar with what we do. These seem to be slightly contradictory tasks. I propose to restate some of the principal issues and to ask how far they are significant outside the arts subjects with which we have so far been mainly concerned.

But there is a prior question: Why is it that the interests and membership of the Colloquium are so steeply inclined towards the arts? Our work so far has been mainly historical, and history is an ‘arts’ subject (so far as these labels mean anything). And I suppose, still speaking crudely, that an interest in history is commoner amongst arts people than among scientists. But the colloquium was not conceived as a purely historical body. Contemporary textbooks are just as significant as those of the past, and they permit certain kinds of study and analysis which are impossible with older books.

Therefore two questions should be addressed to members of the colloquium: Why have we taken so little interest in contemporary textbooks? Should we now recognise an imbalance which we ought to correct? And to the scientists we should ask, Do you find contemporary textbooks more interesting, and more important, than past ones?

I have met in my own work a difficulty which I think may be more obtrusive in the study of contemporary textbooks. The layout of a page, the use of different typefaces, the design of diagrams, are all closely related to methods of teaching. They express the values and practices of their own time, and they may be influential in the future. But it is difficult to prevent one's analysis of the characteristics of the textbook from sliding into an extended discussion of teaching methods which leaves the book itself far behind. I have had to discipline myself to stay with the characteristics of the book and with their implications, and not to pursue these implications into fields unrelated to the book being studied.

Our work assumes that textbooks are of historical importance. Why then have they not been more thoroughly studied ? The customary answers are that textbooks, although produced sometimes in vast quantities, were perishable, and tended not to survive; that those which did survive were not considered to have any of the intellectual value possessed, for example, by the sermons of Bishop Wilberforce, nor any of the lasting human interest found in the autobiography of Sir Andries Stockenstromo. Textbooks were tatty and dull. Secondhand booksellers did not keep them; librarians and scholars did not know about them. All that is true, but the most powerful reason is that the kind of cultural history in which textbooks can be seen to be important had not yet developed. In 1961 Raymond Williams proposed 'to examine the history of English education' in such a way that we should ‘see the training of social character shading into specialized training for particular kinds of work, and the definitions of general education taking their colour from both'. He listed the subjects in a medieval curriculum: grammar, rhetoric, astronomy, and so on. 'Yet', he says, 'when we look at actual textbooks, we see how these subjects were organised by the dominant principles of Latin and the Church'. But that is exactly what he, and other writers, did not do. Their discussions were (and still often are) conducted in terms of subjects, and they do not look at 'actual textbooks'. The textbooks provide most of the evidence for the nature of the subjects, but they are overlooked. (see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution Part 2, Chap. 1)

On the other hand some of us in the colloquium have spent too much energy seeking in textbooks for evidence that they were significant historical documents. I have myself searched for evidence that a particular textbook exerted an identifiable influence. Robert Burns, the poet, praised an anthology compiled by Arthur Masson, who had taught him. Burns even names two pieces, by Addison, which he had particularly liked. You can hardly get a closer relation than that between textbook and influential public figure. But what of it? The influence of a single stimulus cannot be quantified unless it can be isolated; and Burns was conspicuously open to a variety of stimuli. It may be that in other subjects the influence of a book can be more usefully measured. Is that so? I doubt it, and I think we must be content to assume that the books which children spend many hours intensively studying do influence their attitudes, and through them influence attitudes in society as a whole. We need not doubt the influence of television just because it cannot be proved, and we need not doubt that chauvinistic and tendentious textbooks of history, geography and scripture, for example, do immense harm.

A small question arises about autobiographical writing. Surely if someone says he was influenced by J. B. Bury's History of Greece one can accept that as significant evidence? It has been said, and my own limited search confirms it, that even in the autobiographies of those who have had to struggle for an education there is little said about the books. What is said is mostly about the teachers. Do we find that reassuring?

Is it then the case that nothing much needs to be done to establish the historical role of textbooks? I think we have to shift our ground. It is not by trying to prove influence that we shall convince our historian colleagues. What we need to do is demonstrate the existence and characteristics of textbooks. We demonstrate their existence by joining the bibliographers. There are now the facilities, but not the money to use them, for compiling specific bibliographies, with locations of surviving copies. Am I right in believing that scientists have done more in this way than have the rest of us?

In the meantime a small contribution would be for the Colloquium to set up a unit (one person, one computer) to which the private owners of textbooks published before, say 1900, or 1915, or 1960, would send basic details, on a prescribed form. Two hundred pounds worth of advertisements in national papers, and the goodwill of relevant journals and of the teachers' associations, would bring to light texts and editions which national, library-based bibliographies cannot reach.

Let me give, as an illustration, an outline sketch of the origin and development of a familiar type of textbook --- the verse anthology. There have always been what we may call memorabilia, texts, in any field of study, made up of short items of information or exhortation, memorably expressed, and usually to be learnt by heart. Two types are relevant here, call them the moral and the technical. Moral collections are such as The book of proverbs or the Adagia of Erasmus. Such texts provided moral education in a literary context. The technical collections, also with a strong moralistic tone, were used in the teaching of Latin and rhetoric: works such as the countless Sententiae pueriles and Abraham Fraunce's The Arcadian rhetoric of 1588. These books provided literary and linguistic education in a moral context.

Overlapping with both the moral and the technical was the commonplace book, the book into which the private reader, the preacher, the teacher and the pupil transcribed short passages which pleased him or might be professionally useful. We still do this.

Few of the early commonplace books have been published. Ann Moss, in her recent Printed commonplace books and the structure of renaissance thought (Clarendon Press, 1996) refers to 'the many thousands of manuscript commonplace compilations located in libraries throughout Europe'. These commonplace books contained verse and prose, were used by adults and (to an unknown extent) by schoolboys. The first explicit reference to the use in school of literary commonplace books in English is in 1634, but their pedagogic tone had been apparent for a century before then. It was not until 1717 that the first anthology appeared designed explicitly for school (a girls' school). It was unusual not only in this but in its having rudimentary notes, a feature which was rare until the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries the verse anthology changed the duality of its contents, but these changes are relevant rather more to pedagogy, than to its development as a textbook. The big change came with the introduction of public examinations in the middle of the nineteenth century. The verse anthology now had imposed on it an apparatus which separated school texts (with introduction, biographical information, notes explanatory, stylistic, grammatical, metrical) from those anthologies which were intended for younger pupils or for home reading. The anthology lost what had been a useful indeterminancy as between adult and child, home and school. In our own time this indeterminancy has been to some extent restored; the grimly defensive academicism of the English set book has been relaxed; the verse anthology becomes again a book as well as a textbook.

One expanding field of knowledge, with which the Colloquium has made some useful contact, is the history of publishing and of the book generally. Here our attention is drawn not only to the make-up of the book as a physical object but to the number and size of editions and to the book's reception. For this last there is a quantity of evidence in nineteenth-century journals containing reviews of textbooks. We have not made enough use of this material.

So much for demonstrating the existence of textbooks. To demonstrate their characteristics is to show how they mediate ideas, explain them, confuse them, obstruct them, initiate them; to show the developing functions of prefaces, lists of contents, indexes, appendices, footnotes, paragraphs and chapters -- all of which change over time in response to social and economic pressures. We need to clarify the degree to which a book was intended for class use, a copy for each pupil; for class reference, the bulk of the teaching, from the book, being given orally by the master; for use virtually by the master alone, programming his oral teaching. Was the book intended just for home use (Morning conversations of a governess and her pupils: or, an attempt to simplify the Linnaean system of Zoology, 1830), or did it try for both the home and the school markets (The elements of botany, for families and schools, 1813).

The earliest textbooks were meant to be learned by heart. How far is the structure of the book affected by the popularity of memorisation? How much time was to be spent on the book? Even in nineteenth-century prefaces there are references to the pupils 'going through' a textbook -- even a reader -- four or five times.

The contents and structure of the books have a complex relationship with schools, parents and publishers; their production, distribution and longevity have economic consequences; their authors, naïve and undereducated as they often were, nevertheless represented small centres of influence, sometimes far away from the metropolis, which only a few local historians know about.

The characteristics of a textbook provide a delayed picture of some of the characteristics of society.

 

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Paradigm Catalogue Textbook Colloquium