I remember the denim. Despite having spent five years diligently studying French, that is all I can recall about the textbooks from which we plucked our knowledge twice a week. For an hour at a time we would gaze at the pages, but the only thing I can see now are the stonewashed jackets and indigo jeans that seemed to be worn by every “French” person in the photographs.

That might seem a damning verdict on 1990s textbooks, but the degree to which I can conjure the pages to life in my mind is probably not the right metric to use. A better measure might be the amount of knowledge gleaned from the textbook that has stayed in my long-term memory, or perhaps my GCSE results. Certainly, these are the proxies for learning we rely on so heavily in education now.

There are other elements in our assessment of textbooks worthy of contemplation, though. How much planning time did the textbook save my teachers? How much easier was it to form a coherent curriculum because the textbook provided the framework? How much simpler was it to set a cover lesson when all students needed to do was turn to the requisite page?

Our cover feature this week explores these questions and more. It charts how the once ubiquitous teaching tool became an educational outcast and examines the recent resurgence of textbooks in our classrooms.

What’s clear in that journey is that the humble textbook picked up a lot of ideological and political baggage, so much so that judging it neutrally as a tool of the classroom has become almost impossible. The questions above are rarely explored in detail - instead, one has to be for or against them. This is about as useful a gauge of textbook impact as my attempts to remember the look of the pages.

This sort of thing happens too frequently in education. Tools, approaches, viewpoints - they all get channelled off into different belief boxes from which they are never able to escape. Role play? Ah, we shall gaffer-tape you into the “edutainment” box! Cognitive load theory? Climb into this box of “chalk and talk” teaching, for this is your home now! Restorative justice? Why, you must be anti-exclusions - put yourself right here! And so on, and so on. It’s reductive and it’s harmful.

One of the fantastic things about watching a great teacher at work is their ability to be flexible, to be knowledgeable enough to scan the great canon of educational ideas and select the right thing for the right moment, and to do that without prejudice, embarrassment or fear.

There are not many teachers now who feel free enough to do that. Partly, that’s the fault of a high-accountability culture, but it’s also about allegiances, about who might be looking in. Particularly for those teachers on social media, there has been an adoption of “brand mentality”: we must be clear about who we are and what we stand for and stay true to that. Plurality is seen as weakness. Deviation is dilution. Show a discrepancy, and who knows what they will be saying about you or making you do next.

Textbooks are such a good example of this. They are a simple tool for classroom instruction that can be used in multiple different ways and to differing degrees. And yet, they have come to symbolise something much more than they are.

I long for the day when teachers get some freedom. There shouldn’t be teacher “types”. We shouldn’t feel the need to label them. Educational theory and practice should be a pick-and-mix, not a grab bag.

Teachers would be happier and pupils would benefit too, I am sure. The only casualties would be those who profit from ideological dichotomies. I can live with that.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 22 October 2021 issue under the headline “Why are teacher tribes harmful? Here’s a textbook example”