Imagine you are a child living in the 1960s. You are looking forward to school today as you will be studying your favourite text book – the book about plants and insects. It may be a thin book, but it contains so much fascinating information. You love reading through it’s pages and you can’t entirely understand why others in your class are not as happy to memorise the information. You think it is simply fascinating.
When I showed the children this ‘Whys and Ways: Plants and Insects’ they were fascinated by the range and scope of information contained within it. They were intrigued to find out more about some of the plants and insects which they frequently encounter, but when I told them the original owner of the text was expected to memorise the information, they were not quite as enthusiastic. They felt that memorising information like this was unnecessary saying ‘you can just look it up if you actually need to know something. There’s only so much you can remember!’
Text books are something which all school aged children are familiar with, and indeed which their parents and grandparents probably remember quite clearly too. Many children cannot imagine people older than their grandparents or great grandparents having to use such texts, yet their history actually goes back thousands of years. Hand written and copied texts were prepared by the ancient Greeks and many of these were specifically prepared for education. Socrates actually worried that the ability to write down and disseminate information might lessen the ability of Greeks to remember information – though we wouldn’t know of his worries at all if they hadn’t been written down! Text books as we know them though did not come about until the printing press was invented.
The printing press made it possible to standardise texts and print multiple copies of the same text without error. These textbooks were often not actually used by students though, but instead used by teachers or tutors to prepare lessons and to assist in teaching. These texts were also only used by the wealthy who could afford education. This was an era when education was a choice and not available to everybody and the textbooks were an added expense. They were certainly not commonly available. Compulsory education changed all of this and by the 19th century standardised text books actually used by child aged students were becoming commonplace. By the mid 20th century every student usually was expected to have the required texts to hand, such as the one I showed the children. Some schools allowed these texts to be borrowed, but many students owned their own library of texts which took up room and could be expensive to purchase. Of course today, space is not such an issue as many text books are available online or via ebook!