Of making many books there is no end

What do you feel when you walk into a #bookshop ? How does it look? Sound? Even smell? And what messages does it send about the power, value, and joy of #reading ? Perhaps you have a favourite place you could share in the comments, or a rich memory of bygone beauties like Gould’s in Newtown (Sydney, Australia).

One of the current NSW Higher School Certificate texts is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I went looking for a copy of it in an “educational bookshop”. It seemed reasonable to assume they would have an HSC text in store – its name is, after all, XXXXX Educational Bookstore (it seems unethical to name it, as might soon become clear).

What an extraordinary sight and experience! Floor to ceiling looked like the photo. And although possibly not much larger than 30m2, they somehow managed to create a few aisles and nooks, summoning much “excuse me” and “sorry” as a few of us navigated tight passages and each other on our quest to find whatever #literary paradise beckoned.

It looked like the publishing equivalent of a candy store – gaudy, iridescent, visually assaulting. Then I realised: there would be no “clocks striking thirteen” (Orwell, 1949/2021, p. 1) in this shop. I asked the proprietor if she had a copy.

“What?”

“Nineteen Eighty-Four?” No response. “The novel?” No response. “It’s an HSC English text.”

“No, I don’t have that”.

I felt like summoning John Cleese in the famous bookshop sketch with Marty Feldman – “funny, we’ve got quite a lot of books here”. But then the full horror dawned. These were not books. These were cribs, Excel coaching texts, Spark, and Cliff Notes. They were publications…about books, but not the books themselves. They mediated a full book into easily digestible guides and sample essays. They preordained key ideas, themes, and characterisations. Like mother birds, they pre-digested and regurgitated nourishing literature for squawking chicks, saving their time and intellect from directly facing the mirror of Orwell’s dystopia.

This was called an “educational” bookshop, but invoking a name does not make it so. I would have named it a “coaching” outlet, a distribution centre for interpretations, but not an #educational bookshop. The aesthetics and semiotics of the space are unambiguous: this is where you come to get answers for assessments and tests, not to engage deeply and directly with texts of human profundity and significance. The accumulation of so many study “aids”, and only the aids and not the texts for which the aids are written, creates meaning through their very spatial concentration. One coaching text, on its own, seems innocuous, but an entire shop dedicated to them “transforms the most ordinary and everyday trivia of existence into carriers of significance” (Esslin, 1987, p. 38). The significance seems to be that challenge and engagement are not the primary purposes of the XXXXX Educational Bookshop.

To some extent, all teachers are mediators, interpreters, curators, semioticians. We select content, resources, and pedagogical strategies. We highlight some things and downplay or even ignore others. We know the narrative arc of the unit of work, of the term, or even of the whole academic year, and we lead student learning through that arc. As students grow and change, we also broaden their scope to set their own learning priorities and goals, supporting their emergence as increasingly self-capable learners. So how does this differ from publishers of notes and cribs? Are our students challenged to grow by what and how I teach, or are they learning that the semiotics of formal education might only be to pass the next assessment or keep the teacher happy?

Might we unconsciously encourage students to doublethink (to invoke Orwell again)? With the best intent in the world, the most creative pedagogy, the most positive and inclusive classroom climate, and a strong relational focus on my students, might it still be possible they come along for the ride all the while keeping focus only on what needs to be done “to pass”? Would they tell me the truth if I asked them? And would I hear it if they did?

As we lurch through a 21st century utopian/dystopian world of AI in education, Nineteen Eighty-Four seems even more prescient. Alternate facts, post-truth, and a dishonourable roll of wars against regimes that some nations formerly held as allies almost feels like Orwell’s work has shifted from the realm of fiction to contemporary journalism. It may have even more to say to us now than it has in the past. So let us encourage students to chew its dense bleakness for themselves, rather than blend it into a smoothie and hope that adding chia seeds will make it even better.

Further reading

Esslin, Martin. (1987). The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen. Methuen London.

Orwell, G. (1949/2021). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Collins Classics.