Textbooks, the dinosaurs of education

Debbie Jacob

NOW THAT our annual musical interlude is behind us, it’s time to focus on one of our most pressing issues: education. Important news stories get lost in Carnival, so it’s important to revisit one on education that appeared during that time. This story came from a public inquiry held with some education stakeholders at the Red House in Port of Spain on February 21.

Independent Senator Dr Paul Richards spoke about the textbook problem, elitist schools, and the state of education in the Caribbean. He questioned who benefits most from elitist schools and suggested an unnamed group of people who had been described as the "textbook mafia.”

Twenty-five years ago, I challenged that textbook mafia. I criticised textbooks for mistakes and pointed out that 80 per cent of the exercises in our children’s texts featured low-level comprehension questions rather than higher-level analytical ones. I said that the reading passages in those texts didn’t provide information to answer about 20 per cent of the questions. I got attacked mercilessly from one person writing many of those textbooks. No one defended me. The ever-complaining public didn’t back me up either.

When I taught CXC English language in YTC about 15 years ago, I only used the textbook about 20 per cent of the time, just enough to expose students to the boring, irrelevant material they would find on their tests, like a Seamus Heaney poem on Blackberry Picking. My students thought we would be discussing cellphones. They needed a translator to understand blackberries as fruit and thorns as another word for picka.

I relied on articles covering interesting newsworthy events and literature to teach grammar or analytical skills in context and encouraged reading in place of textbooks. Our textbooks include more Caribbean content now, but they are still not the ideal way to teach because they offer snippets of information rather than extended material for in-depth analysis. Textbooks are the dinosaurs of education. They’re expensive and can’t be passed down because of the problem of new editions.

A new edition doesn’t mean you get a fresh, new textbook. When I taught SAT classes, I learned that new editions require only 20 per cent of the material to be changed. Placing the same questions in a different section qualifies as a change, along with correcting mistakes and adding a few new passages or questions. Some questions from previous editions are removed, but the changes in the SAT textbooks were often mostly nothing more than a scrambling exercise. I allowed students to bring older editions to class, but the time wasted from an “updated” textbook forced me to insist on the latest edition.

Textbooks are the most convenient way around creative thinking for teachers who should be selecting material from excellent fiction and non-fiction books to teach analytical skills and encourage reading, the foundation of education. Reading literature develops critical thinking skills, self-confidence and empathy not found in textbook questions.

In that public inquiry, Richards highlighted a Barbadian media report which said the Caribbean education system could be "in a state of crisis." It has been for some time because it still favours information over analysis, and it’s not ensuring students have the academic skills needed for tertiary education and functioning in the workplace.

The problem of elitist schools was also mentioned. They are privileged and divisive. They perpetuate social inequality. Education has become a private business enterprise with people cashing in on mock exam papers and extra lessons. Costly extra lessons create unfair advantages for poor children, but how can teachers cover their subjects thoroughly and in a timely fashion with 30 students – all with different learning styles – in a classroom?

The answer to this problem is not exams that group students by their abilities. I have not found any study that advocates this division. Students benefit from being exposed to different learning styles. When I taught English and the media classes designed to help students who struggled in English, many students taking Advanced Placement classes (the US equivalent of CAPE), took my classes as electives.

If you observed a class, you couldn’t tell the high-level students apart from the struggling ones, and sometimes the so-called "struggling” students excelled because the class depended on visual learning and movement, which played to their strengths. The students complemented each other’s skills in these classes designed for relevance and individual learning styles.

What most saddens me is that our education issues are not difficult to fix. Improving education relies on an investment in creativity, diversity, and relevance. So far, we haven’t been willing to do that.