Fri, Sep 28, 2012 page8

• Creative versus textbook learning

  • By Herbert Hanreich
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  Teachers’ Day, the annual appreciation of teachers in Taiwan and elsewhere on the assumed birthday of Confucius on Sept. 28, is an occasion to reflect on some of the local practices that take place under the label of an education which derives its core principles from the so-called “Sage.” There is no doubt that education is of high priority for most parents, who often sacrifice a huge share of their income to enable their children to have a better education than they themselves had when they were young. In this aspect, the efforts in Taiwan deserve global recognition.

  However, there are some things money can’t buy: for instance, a good education. Most of a good education’s success depends on the personal attitude of the learner, immune to financial incentives. Learning is an individual process that exclusively and incessantly happens in the mind of the learner. The teacher’s role is, among others, to create a learning environment that encourages students to gradually take over individual responsibility for their own personal intellectual development.

  This is best achieved when students learn how to actively integrate what is being learned into their own mental world, ie, to transfer problems they encounter in their study into their own world as problems that need to be solved. An active mind permanently translates problems of the world into problems within one’s mind. The more such translations take place, the more learning takes place. The more learning takes place, the more the problems of the world change for the learner. This is so because the minds understanding these problems are changing as well. Learning always means changing one’s mind.

  Good learners need to be creative. Learning is a process which takes time, freedom and passion.

  Unfortunately, such a process of learning hardly takes place in the daily teaching routines at universities in Taiwan. There are many reasons for this educational malaise, and much has been written on this topic. One issue, however, deserves more attention when it comes to identifying the many culprits of a failed education system: textbooks.

  The use of textbooks makes sense in fields of science, engineering or the law, where you have a generally accepted canon of knowledge needed as a prerequisite for further studies. However, further studies, ie, studies that reach beyond textbooks, hardly ever happen during undergraduate years; textbooks remain the only source of knowledge for most students. The result is the creation of an exclusive textbook culture in classrooms with teachings of basic introductions for disengaged students who just need to memorize well-prepared materials often alien to their minds. Learning as an individual process doesn’t happen in this way.

  When it comes to the subjects of humanities studies with their interpretative nature (history, literature, philosophy, language), the negative effects on learning caused by textbooks are even more serious.

  The local textbook culture as it is practiced especially in higher studies is a major contributor to the existence of fake universities in Taiwan, where fake students are taught by fake university teachers.

  First, professors following textbooks implicitly admit that they are not good enough, or not willing, to design courses based on their own ideas. In either case, they are employed at the wrong institutions; additionally, textbook teaching is a cheap way of teaching — proceeding from chapter to chapter, with the conceptual work already done by others. Textbooks reward intellectually lazy teachers.

  Moreover, content and concepts of teaching are prescribed in a way that anybody with just a basic education could teach nearly anything provided a “good” textbook is available; the teachers are arbitrarily interchangeable, their personality would not matter. But why would we then need “professors”? A good student from the previous year could easily do the job equally well.

  Second, textbooks cannot react to events that take place at the time of teaching, making the knowledge transfer from books into minds much more difficult due to the lack of application of learned contents to real-world (professional) problems; hence the copious “world-less” students that roam many campuses in Taiwan.

  The present territorial dispute surrounding the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) — or the Senkaku Islands as the Japanese call them — would be, for instance, an interesting case to be discussed in history or international law classes. Another example would be a discussion in economics classes about the diverging solutions US and European economists offer to solve the persisting debt crisis in Europe.

  However, the syllabi, dictated by the logical order of textbook chapters, leave no space for the “luxury” of looking into the present world. The textbook world functions as a proxy world. It is an artificial world in its own right, with only a few small windows connecting to the outside world, but with open gates inviting readers to the self-sufficient, “narcissistic” world of exams.

  Third, students in Taiwan are tempted to believe that all they need to understand about their subject is what can be found between the covers of a given textbook. There is no incentive for them to consult other, more authentic sources of knowledge. Instead, textbook cultures train their students pervasively that what they want to know is what they need to know in order to pass exams; understanding is considered to be sheer luxury, a waste of time and energy.

  What’s worse is that even if students wish to resort to the “real” world, they would not be able to do so because of the way top research is presented in “real” books (as opposed to textbooks) or journal articles, which is very different from what is presented in textbooks. Unless practiced, only a few students would acquire the academic skills necessary to understand academic contents that are not written for teaching purposes.

  Textbooks are always chosen by the teachers. This may be convenient for students, but in the long run, it incapacitates their ability to select on their own literature of good quality relevant to them.

  In classrooms we see on a daily basis how helpless students are when trying to retrieve the “right” sources of reference for academic purposes from an ocean of online literature.

  Excessive textbook teaching transforms professors into unimaginative commentators of contents they did not produce; students into memory experts of things they often don’t understand; and universities into institutions that charge money for the deformation of the minds of those who pay for this privilege.

  Since teachers in Taiwan are so closely connected to textbook venerations, I would suggest using the annual ritual of Teachers’ Day celebrations as an occasion to critically assess the harm some educational practices inflict on young minds in the name of the man whose birthday we celebrate on that day.

  Herbert Hanreich is an assistant professor at I-Shou University in Greater Kaohsiung.
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