Schenectady Synecdoche

[O]n this trip to Japan I could not avoid the conclusion that a new mood of nationalism has . . . begun to take hold in this country which has been publicly devoted to peace and economic prosperity for so long.

One sign is the Japanese authorities' approval of several new school history textbooks written by known right-wing scholars.

One book which has angered the Chinese failed to make any assessment of the number of Chinese civilians killed in the infamous Rape of Nanjing.

The internationally accepted view is that hundreds of thousands died in an orgy of sexual violence and killing by Japanese troops.

And Japan's largest national newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, in what I take to be blatant disregard for the known facts, has called on its readers to celebrate, because the new textbooks have cut out all mention of one of the greatest of all the humiliations inflicted by Imperial Japan on its neighbours: the use of large numbers of women in conquered Asian countries as sex slaves for the Japanese army.

It was right to set the record straight, I read, because the accusations "had been shown to be untrue".

Surely I thought modern Japan could not give in to the poison of such deceit and hypocrisy ever again.

And Will Richardson makes a case against all textbooks everywhere. Really, his argument is not against textbooks but against textbooks: "We have a long way to go in our thinking about all of this, but the age of dynamic, interactive content is here now, and we should be pushing our teachers to move away from just depending on a printed text to deliver their curriculum." I agree; let's get everything online, not just as an alternative way of publishing but as a way of transforming learning.

But Richardson's post is contiguous with a familiar anti-textbook discourse; he says,

Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

I take this as a statement in favor of active learning, of the sort that Richardson believes (as do I) that interactive online instruction would promote. But look how readily it aligns with David Bleich's argument. Some tidbits from my reading notes:

"[T]extbooks seem to assume the emptiness of the students' minds" (35). Composition textbooks, unlike other types of textbooks, don't supercede older books (16). "[E]specially when used by inexperienced teachers," they "reinforce socially coercive constraints" (19). They don't call upon readers' experiences and don't ask readers to contribute to the discussion (16-17). They set up a one-way transmission of knowledge from teacher to student (34). "The patronizing language of textbooks helps to perpetuate the hierarchical structures of society. These structures render coercive speech by an authoritative class of people to a less authoritative class. . . . . [I]n teaching, there is no way to authorize the equivalence of students' language experiences to those of teachers because teachers' judgments rendered through grading ends every course" (35). "Textbooks in writing do not ask students to relate their own knowledge, experience, hopes, and wishes to the problems of writing and language use" (32). They don't challenge their own tradition (28). They substitute for the teacher (17), who is typically underprepared for the task of teaching writing (18).
—Bleich, David. "In Case of Fire, Throw In (What to Do with Textbooks Once You Switch to Sourcebooks)." (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks: Conflicts of Culture, Ideology, and Pedagogy. Ed, Xin Liu Gale and Fredric G. Gale. Albany: SUNY UP, 1999. 15-44.

Meanwhile, I peck away at my keyboard, pestering my friends for samples of students' writing that will go in a writer's handbook. That I have under contract. With McGraw-Hill. Irony á go-go. I make my own contribution to pedagogy and to the historical record about good writing practices. If I do well, I will help writers write. And teachers teach. The handbook struggle is a daily, yearly one: the challenge is to write what I believe to be true about writing, but within the framework that Friend Hodges established lo these many decades ago (see Debbie Hawhee's CCC 50.3 article, allegedly online for NCTE members, although the archives aren't working for me ce soir), a framework within which teachers and programs have become accustomed to moving, a framework whose absence from a handbook means the handbook will not be purchased and hence will not have the opportunity to change writers and the world. It's a far greater challenge than I ever could have imagined, even though my friends Bob Schwegler and Andrea Lunsford, themselves handbook authors, warned me. And before too many more moons pass, my handbook will finally be published, in its first edition. And then I will take my place among the pantheon of textbook writers whose work constructs writers and the world in ways the author never imagined but which readers will perceive and seize upon. I enter the fray knowing that my book will, because it is a composition textbook, perform negative cultural work that I failed to anticipate and ward off. I enter the fray hoping that my book's positive cultural work will tip the scales far in the other direction.

I don't have any grand conclusion here. The best I can do is to say that I don't think textbooks are themselves a problem. Bad textbooks are, and so is bad pedagogy. I can also say that textbooks will always, painfully, demonstrate to us the ways in which the teaching of composition is complicit in a hierarchical society. Getting rid of textbooks doesn't fix that, because it doesn't change the hierarchical society of which the academy in general and composition specifically is an instrument.