The unmourned textbook Nicholas Tucker
The old-fashioned English textbook is creeping back into schools but it must be stopped, writes Nicholas Tucker
Hardback textbooks, once such a part of English lessons in secondary schools, have now mostly disappeared. Given to optimistic titles – Vital English, Positive English, English with Interest – they burgeoned during the 1960s when there was more money around for bulk purchases. Every volume tended to follow the same formula, whereby various different tasks were set on each page with the intention of keeping pupils reasonably occupied while hopefully learning something. They were also very useful for setting homework (‘Page 35, sections 4, 5 and 6’). But in most cases the model remained basically reactionary, going for exercises reaching back into increasingly irrelevant former orthodoxies.
Grammar exercises usually remained king, with pupils instructed and then tested on the difference between the Future Perfect Continuous in the Past and the Future in the Past Continuous. Learning about that gloomy army of interrogative adverbs, demonstrative adjectives and intransitive verbs was another given. Exercises in writing skills were often similarly bleak: ‘Describe a sewing machine in 200 words’; ‘Explain in one sentence how a windmill works’; ‘How to tie a shoelace’; ‘Write out the rules of your new school and learn them’. A passage from Tolstoy in one textbook appeared only so that it could be re-written to produce an opposite meaning. Drafting a house agent’s report based on a descriptive passage from Arnold Bennett was another odd suggestion. An invitation to compose ‘A humorous account of an egg-and-spoon race’ had the same doomed, still-born feeling about it as did the injunction to ‘debate humorously’ a fairly dismal choice of topics.
Creative writing also produced some strange advice. ‘There are five main points in describing faces,’ briskly opined one textbook author. Briefly running through these, he offered ‘ He flashed a
quick glance across the field’ (original italics) as an example of how to write more vividly. One way of starting a composition that ‘never fails’, one textbook said, is to begin with ‘A good noise’. Examples given include ‘Flop!’, ‘Boom!’ and ‘Kee-a! Kee-a!,’ supposedly the cry of a ‘lone seagull’. And when describing the sea, it goes on, bring in ‘an apt quotation’; for example, ‘I must go down to the sea again’ could well precede ‘The vast scene spread before me as I stood on Barmouth sea front.’
The exercises most generally hated by pupils went under the umbrella title Comprehension. Slabs of prose, often taken from 19th-century texts and so avoiding copyright fees, were then followed by obsessively close questioning. As if anticipating a negative response, one textbook insisted in its preface that ‘You will find this book very interesting.’ The dull extracts for analysis were then drawn mostly from defunct copies of the
Children’s Newspaper. ‘Don’t therefore think that this book has been written by a couple of “squares’’ ’, its two authors go on, somewhat desperately.
Suggestions for writing poetry could be no more inspiring: ‘A few lines based on a shopping list’, ‘A rule of the road’. Poetry appreciation suffered too. One compiler might have bewildered secondary modern pupils by criticising a poem for its ‘lukewarm pastoralism’ and ‘viewiness’. Also included in his textbook was a photograph of a neatly dressed Robert Frost speaking to an attentive audience in order to make the point that to be a poet ‘One does not have to have the outward appearance of a Bunthorne or a lay-about.’ ‘Lay-about’ would have been understood at the time, but W S Gilbert’s Oscar Wilde caricature Bunthorne?
Hints about spelling could seem equally out of touch, with ‘chauffeur’ and ‘millinery’ selected among 100 useful words to be learned, as well as ‘suave’ and ‘iridescent’. Elsewhere, pupils are asked to complete various ossified sayings such as ‘Brown as a …?’ Answering ‘berry’ to that one would have got a tick, even though most berries are red.
Lessons in letter-writing often seemed aimed only at those living in comfortable suburbia. Sample letters in one textbook started out with addresses such as ‘The Beeches’, ‘Green Gates’ and ‘Agincourt’; all remote from pupils living in council estates. When finishing a letter, ‘Best wishes’ was suggested as a reasonable equivalent for ‘Love from’. Coaching in broader life skills came up with ‘In general, you should introduce a boy to a girl.’
Most textbooks in all school subjects disappeared long before the digital revolution, for photocopied work sheets devised by classroom teachers proved a much cheaper alternative. But today signs of grammar pedantry and overprescriptive rules for composition and comprehension may once again be creeping back in schools. In 2014 the schools minister Nick Gibb spoke out against what he called an anti-textbook ethos. Let’s hope that he was not advocating a return to stultifying textbooks at their worst.
‘Must you always be so anthropomorphic?’