A Culture of Textbooks

When you were in school, imagine if you never had textbooks. How would it have been in a classroom without a textbook? How do you think you would be able to write an examination? Or how did you feel in your graduate studies when you did not have anyone prescribed a textbook? Did you struggle in exams because you didn't have a book or you didn't follow the prescribed book?

I remember, back in school, we used to be very particular about completing every chapter and given exercises from the school textbooks to be able to write examinations. The teachers used to follow the textbooks, chapter by chapter and there was even revision of these chapters before the exams. I think we can all relate to the fact that at one point or another we have been scared to see the widths of the textbooks. After completing my school, when I took admission in B.EL.ED, which is a professional course in the field of education, I struggled a lot initially and I saw everyone around struggling equally. We only had a B.EL.ED handbook defining the curriculum to be covered, themes to be studied and some suggested readings. There were no prescribed textbooks. I did not have an idea how things work in college and especially in a course of education, so initially when the teachers told us that there won't be any books, I was in shock and I think almost everyone in the class was equally perplexed. All of us were concerned about the examinations from the very beginning of the year. The teachers kept on providing us with all the reading materials required to understand the concepts but it never felt complete. I never felt confident of what I had read or studied from different sources as they were not there in the form of any prescribed textbooks. Every time we were given any reflective assignments, we used to whine about the lack of textbooks and rigidity in our course and how everything appears to be so open-ended.

Today, as a 3rd-year student of education, I don't think it was any of our fault to think like that. In our education system, especially at school levels, textbooks are given more importance than the curriculum and both are even used interchangeably. Every student in the class needs to have a copy of the textbook and the teacher is supposed to spend time in the classroom to make the students familiar with its content. What do you think is the role of a textbook for a teacher? The first thing that would come to most of our minds is that textbooks help teachers to teach in the class and act as support material but is it so?

One day,? I saw one of my very favorite English teachers who used to be very in terms of her classroom approach, teaching Geography in a primary class. When I asked her about it she said, ‘kuch nahi, book se padhana hi toh hota hai.’ There came a certain sense of realization and confusion which I could not put in words back then. Textbooks define the curriculum to be covered, activities to be done, questions to be asked, it even defines the time to be given to teach concepts and provide assessment techniques also. So who exactly do you think has a more supportive role, a textbook or a teacher? Though textbooks are expected to be a support for the teachers they rather limit them and impose an authority. By providing a definite pattern to be followed for every topic in every class, it is assumed that the teachers are incapable of doing it on their own and are dumb.? As a result, the teacher eventually loses his/her creativity and capacity to be able to produce content for the learners and reality meets this assumption! So we are basically in a system which does not just assume the teachers to be incapable and dumb but it ends up turning it to be true.