Failures of Textbooks

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts:

While reading the Continuity and Change section of the passage I was immediately drawn to Wineburg's critique of modern historical textbooks. He first starts out with the three main failures of textbooks today; their editorial elimination of "metadiscourse" or the arguments or stances made by Historians in their professional work, which are later taken out. Secondly, he first states and then further rebukes the lack of primary source documents, or their belittlement "so as not to interfere with the main text". Finally he remarks on the "omniscient third person" narration of the works, which tie back into the elimination of metadiscourse. His thoughts on the failures of textbooks line up exactly with mine. This editorial process seems to turn our schoolbooks into little more than specialized encyclopedias, blindly thrusting "knowledge" onto the reader with little thought or interpretation necessary. The unintended side effect of textbooks is the effectual shutdown of learning. Textbook reading becomes boring because the student can put their brain into shut down and attempt to internalize the information via osmosis. Modern textbooks thus become collections of dry information that does little to develop the students own thought processes.


Furthermore, the narration of the works give a sense of "knowledge from on high", giving an authoritative stance on the knowledge provided. This is not only distracting in my opinion, but dangerous as it removes any contention or divergence in the claims supplied by the editors. It makes History appear as a flat landscape, devoid of the conflict of ideas and paradigms that riddle the mountainous terrain of time. One may go so far as to say as such transient positions given ruin the student's individual thought, compressing all ideas into one unified code, and striking the others that disagree from the record.

I'd like to note however that I am not completely against the idea of a textbook, and promote their burnings in the streets (Though I could warrant such a response when dealing with The American Pageant, which was perhaps the worst task heaped upon me by the IB program). Textbooks are a great source for preliminary knowledge and inarguable facts such as dates. The main thing to remember is the limitations of such works. Most textbooks cover a vast expanse of time, and not everything can be adequately expressed or addressed. For specifics and true historical understanding through conflicting ideas one must turn to modern historians' professional work, complete with metadiscourse, or even better, to primary sources. It is from these documents that one can develop a true sense of the events studied. Though of course, these sources are not without their own values and limitations (Which I will get to in my next posting)

As per the task, I must leave anyone who chooses to read my rambling thoughts with a question. I suppose the most fair question could be, "Are Wineburg and I wrong in our critique?". Please note that while I'm adding Wineburg's name to my stance (It's a nasty little trick to make you agree with me) I can by no means speak for him or say that he speaks for mean entirely. Please leave a comment or if you think a response will really merit an entire posting, by all means go ahead.

Ciao,
Jon