Analysis of Texts in the Field of Education

Introduction

Textbooks are core learning materials or documents within the field of education both in printed but also more and more in electronic form. They are aimed at two crucial groups, namely those to be educated (pupils and students) and also the educators (teachers and professors). Therefore, they are of immanent research interest as one of the instruments that teachers use when trying to achieve curricular objectives, but they are also often teaching devices on their own as in the last instance the use of textbooks could theoretically replace instruction itself. With regard to this powerful role, it is not unusual that textbooks are a matter of regulation within numerous educational policies—they are more or less tightly controlled texts. Both the ways in which textbooks are regulated and the regulated texts themselves are places where various ideologies are invested. As put by Apple and Christian-Smith (1991) in The Politics of the Textbook, “. . . texts are not simply ‘delivery systems’ of ‘facts.’ They are at once the results of political, economic, and cultural activities, battles and compromises” (p. 1).

In this article, we will explore the analytical posssibilities of Grice’s general cooperative principle and the maxims connected with it, mainly the maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relation/relevance, and the maxim of manner for the analysis of ideologies that are a part of different texts within the field of education. This theoretical frame will be used for the textual analysis of samples from two specific types of documents: a legal text of a regulation and excerpts from a textbook. The first set of examples stem from a Slovenian regulation on textbook approval, the second set from a history textbook. In both cases, Grice’s ideas will be used to identify implicatures within texts that act as indices of underlying ideological premises.

Our aim is to present an analysis based on Grice’s ideas in a manner that should allow for the application of those and similar principles in the everyday teacher’s task of evaluating the numerous educational texts, but especially in the process of choosing the textbooks the pupils have to buy and use for instruction.

Grice’s General Cooperative Principle

Grice (1989/1991) defined the cooperative/general principle in the following way: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (p. 26). In other words, he offered a general principle that participants in conversation should follow. Therefore, he introduced the term implicature. Conversational implicature helps us so that our clauses succeed more than if they were actually “told,” because our verbal exchanges are, at least to some degree, a cooperative effort—“every participant in their recognizing of a common purpose, mutually received direction etc.” (Kante, 1998, p. 24). Consideration maxims (and sub-maxims), represented in the execution, contribute to results with regard to general cooperative principle. ¹

Textbooks in Schools

Textbooks among other didactical materials are an important element of the school system. In many cases, they provide the supporting point for arranging teacher’s schoolwork and are, however, part of the pupil’s everyday life (Barle & Bezenšek, 2006). The curriculum, its “factual” dimension, the methods of content adaptation are in fact finalized and fortified with textbooks. In the process of acquiring new knowledge, “textbooks/ . . . /are usually the first and the most important textual material” for pupils (Barle & Bezenšek, 2006, p. 109). Still they are by far not the only means of support for teachers; neither is their use mandatory nor even uniform as a decision-making tool that helps deciding when and how the teachers will use one or another learning device that remains within the domain of their autonomy (Justin, 2003). Normally, the choice of a particular textbook for a particular subject is also within a teacher’s autonomy as teachers today ³ have the opportunity to choose from a number of different textbooks on the market.

Although textbook publishing in developed countries is mostly in the domain of market-driven publishing business, this segment of book production and distribution still differs from other segments of the (book) publishing industry. The textbooks for primary and secondary education—the majority of school-age population today go through these segments of educational systems—are in many (but not all) countries submitted to various degrees of public regulation. Slovenia has a system of textbook licensing, whereby a textbook manuscript (in fact, it is a set workbooks complete with illustrations and layout) is approved for use in primary and secondary schools. This does not mean that other textbooks cannot be used in the classroom but teachers are not allowed to demand the purchase or lease of unapproved textbooks from the pupils. However, there is no requirement for teachers to use textbooks in the first place. The licensing system is accompanied with the system of book funds in schools through which pupils lease the textbooks required for a year, returning them to the fund for further use. School book funds are not allowed to buy books that are not officially approved.

The school book regulation is as said not a Slovenian specialty. We will just take a look at a few examples of large markets. The textbooks go, for example, through the approval process in neighboring Austria but also in Germany where every federal state has its own regulation. Mostly, the textbooks are approved by the relevant ministry. In these cases, the approval procedure is aimed at the quality of textbooks, but the selection process is left to the teachers. But the approval (or adoption) processes can also be found in the United States, where as many as 19 federal states have the system of providing free textbooks in public schools. Here, the adoption process is actually the process of selecting the textbook to be prescribed for the pupils. This selection process can be accompanied by fierce ideological debate; for example, the Texas Textbook debate that revolved around the issue of creationism and the interpretation of history had the most media coverage. ⁴

Returning to Slovenian example, such a system creates limitations to a teacher’s autonomy in textbook selection and, more importantly, shapes the editorial and business policies of textbook publishers. The system of school funds requires that only a single title of a textbook for a subject per school should be purchased for a certain period. The duration of this period was not explicitly set by the regulation, but the same regulation includes the provision under which the lease of the textbook should not exceed one third of the purchase price. As school funds are for the greater part self-financed (partially they are subsidized by the Slovenian Ministry of Education and Sport), this provision effectively means that the teacher has the option to choose another textbook only after a minimum period of 3 years. The one textbook per subject also means that teachers who teach the same subject have to negotiate which textbook to choose, thereby further limiting their individual autonomy in shaping the learning process. The 3-year rotation period (or longer) also seriously influences the market conditions for publishers. As a vast majority of pupils lease rather than buy textbooks, that de facto means that the textbook market size is only about one third of the target group and that holds only for the compulsory subjects. Regarding the small size of the Slovenian primary and secondary school textbook market, the economics of textbook production is tight. Still at least in the segment of textbooks for compulsory curriculum in primary schools, several textbooks from different publishers are available for every one of the subjects. ⁵

As excerpts of the rules on approving textbooks will be a matter of closer text analysis later, the procedure and its requirements will be only outlined here. In short, publishers have to submit a finished textbook, set in total with proofread text and illustrations to a commission named by the Ministry of Education and Sport. ⁶ The commission sends them for reviews (by outside experts) concerning linguistic adequacy and scientific accuracy and compliance of the textbook with the curriculum for the relevant subjects, assessing its methodical and didactical approach, the quality of layout and illustrations, and suitability of the textbooks for the developmental stage of pupils. This part of the assessment process is carried out by state-run institutes working in the field of education. Formally, according to the regulation, the assessment process ends either with approval or rejection of the proposed textbook; in other words, there is no formal way to amend the textbook according to the comments by the reviewers within the approval process itself. In practice, however, suggestions for improvements are submitted to the publisher to be implemented within the same approval procedure. ⁷

The legal framework of textbook publishing provides some boundaries and directions to the process of creating textbook content. Within these limitations, the distinction between textbooks and other textual media concerns the specifics of the transformation of scientific content, which is, in a textbook, suitably structured, remodeled, and simplified. The transformation is understandable under the presupposition that pupils (for whom the textbooks are designed) are not able to learn the scientific content in a no-remake form, as this would be first an unaccomplishable cognitive process and second they do not have enough previous knowledge necessary to read those kinds of texts. A textbook therefore serves as an agent (Kovač, Šebart, Krek, Štefanc, & Vidmat, 2005).

Kuhn, who had already thought about the popularization of science, was convinced that scientists, as laymen, draw a large part of their own conceptions about creative scientific activity from authoritarian sources (which systematically conceal existence and a sense of scientific revolutions). From the authority point of view, he thought about three categories of publications: scientific textbooks, popularization, and philosophical works. All of them have one common link which the scientific society presently acknowledges—the starting point of their writing are problems, data, and theories laid out most frequently within the particular complexity of the paradigm (Kuhn, 1962/1998). The aim is the transmission of vocabulary and syntax of contemporary scientific language. It is important “that scientific concepts are made accessible to the students in a number of different ways,” both in teaching and in textbooks (Ahtineva, 2005, p. 26).

The process of vulgarization of the scientific discourse into the more generally comprehensible and didactically useful textbook discourse is a necessarily ideological one. For our purpose, we will define ideology as

the basis of the social representations shared by members of a group. This means that ideologies allow people as group members to organise the multitude of social beliefs about what is good or bad, right or wrong, for them, and to act accordingly. (Van Dijk, 1998, p. 8)

In the context of science vulgarization, those actions include the choice of knowledge permitted into the curricula, the methods of vulgarization, the question of appropriateness of knowledge for certain groups (i.e., age or gender) of pupils, and the relationship between scientific knowledge and other types of knowledge (i.e., beliefs be it religious or political). At the same time, we must see the textbook—as the prime example of vulgarized science and accompanying ideologies—in (at least) two different functions: the function of teaching and the function of learning. In the function of learning (pupils learning activity), the focus is on the vulgarization of scientific paradigms (meaning the transformation of scientific knowledge into school subjects). In the function of teaching, the focus is on the evaluation of the transformation of scientific paradigms in the context of teacher’s educational practices. ⁸

Cooperative Principle Applied

In our analysis, we will first take one step back in trying to identify the ideological presuppositions of what a textbook is in the first place, by analyzing its legal definition. After that, examples from history textbooks will be analyzed. In both cases, Grice’s theory of cooperative principle will be utilized as a tool for discerning implied content (implicatures) that is often a good vantage point in finding ideological premises underlying the text.

Conclusion

The analysis of written text, in our case texts in the field of education—one example of legal regulation another textbook excerpts—by applying the Grice’s conversational maxims is a demonstration of one method of close reading by which tacit presuppositions within the text can be identified. Often these presuppositions are ideological in the sense that they are generalist notions instrumental in interpreting the social world. Schools are named ideological state apparatuses for precisely this reason—they provide mainstream ideological interpretations through didactically transformed scientific texts. What is even more unexpected is the ideology accompanying the textbook market regulation.

In the first part of analysis, we analyzed the legal regulation. For that, we chose the comparative approach to show crucial changes in the period and also to demonstrate ideologies accompanying the textbook market regulation, both in meaning and in reflecting the changes in textbook licensing policy (using the analytical tool of Gricean maxims). The case of two textbook licensing regulations that were enforced in 1996 and 2010 exemplifies this type of addition (in this case, the addition is an overblown definition of the textbook) and its implication. Regarding that which is crucial, this reflection contains the violations of some Gricean maxims, which also has some other implications for school knowledge. This seems to be connected to one of the most problematic requirements, being that “textbooks should allow for acquisition of different levels or categories of knowledge.” The regulation itself does not provide or at least hint at the definition of any of those terms. However, without explication, both can be understood in a myriad of different ways, which de facto renders the clause unusable for the purposes of the regulation itself, namely providing relevant and, in the first place, equal criteria for textbook assessment. This interpretation, which applies the charity principle, presupposing that other principles use the words in an ordinary way, has to give way to the interpretation more in line of Grice’s implicatures that there is a specific meaning to these terms known to addressees of the regulation. In this specific meaning, “levels” or “categories” of knowledge pertain to Bloom’s taxonomy of knowledge, which is according to Justin (2008) heavily misused in Slovenian educational discourse. Another reason is that Bloom’s taxonomy (or any other attempt to categorize different types of learning and the resultant knowledge) is a specific theoretical tool that was not designed for the purpose of evaluating textbooks and therefore such a specific framework should not be a constitutive element of the regulation that defines the licensing of textbooks in general. The fact that the reference to Bloom is not explicit constitutes the violation of Grice’s maxim of manner: avoid the obscurity of expression. Also other Gricean maxims are often violated, namely the maxim of quantity (in the definition of textbooks). The attempt at closely defining the textbook indicates a certain misunderstanding of the general concept of the “rule of law” in present day Slovenia. It is often thought that most, if not every social and political issue, should be solved by passing a law or regulation, written in a detailed manner, that allows those affected by the law to fulfill what is stated in it by simply putting checks for each prescribed requirement. As the case of textbook definition shows, many things in the social world cannot be easily defined in a simple, taxonomically correct manner suitable to legal texts. As we demonstrated, attempts at such definitions easily end in a paradoxical mess.

In the second part of the analysis, we focused on illustrating the violation of maxims by analyzing a history textbook. In the first example, we used the paragraph that describes the point of view called nationalism. It is an example that has several instances in which the maxim of manner is violated. What is even more important in that case is the violation of the maxim of quantity as the contribution is not informative enough for the context in which it occurred. In addition, the national myth from independence is also contained. The application of Grice’s maxims therefore uncovers hidden ideological presuppositions in a history textbook. The next example also shows the violation of the maxim of quantity and quality in the area where the text explains the position of the Catholic Church in post-revolutionary France, by adding another sentence whose validity cannot be easily supported. As the analysis revealed, the didactical transformation in the case of textbook might bring about more than an explanation and rewording of scientific text, itself prone to introducing ideological content. Explicit additions were spotted in the cases analyzed that are not based on the science transformed, namely history. These additions seem to have a role of negotiating between propositions of science and (national or nation making) myths that obviously have to be preserved. The case of two textbook licensing regulations that were enforced in 1996 and 2010 also exemplifies this type of addition (in this case, the addition is an overblown definition of the textbook) and its implication.