The Textbook and Its Importance

The curriculum decides what a school teaches, why it teaches it and how. It sets out objectives, content, activities and methods of evaluation. But a curriculum is not the book a student carries in a school bag every day. It is a plan, and a plan that stays on paper changes nothing in a classroom. Something has to turn its objectives into lessons that can actually be read: explanations, examples, pictures, exercises and activities. That something is the textbook.

Take one example. A class 8 science curriculum may state the objective: "Students will be able to explain how green plants make their food." That sentence on its own teaches nobody anything. In the textbook the same objective becomes a written lesson, a labelled picture of a leaf, a simple experiment and a set of questions at the end. Only then does the objective of the curriculum actually reach the classroom.

The word "organised" in this definition matters. Content is not dropped into a textbook at random. It is divided into units and topics, arranged from easy to harder, and each lesson prepares the ground for the next. A student working through a textbook therefore builds one idea on top of another.

A textbook is teaching material prepared for teaching students formally in school. It is prepared as a written structure of material, based on the subject matter. It is also the basic material for reaching the objectives the curriculum expects. Its main features are these:

• It is prepared to fulfil the objectives of the curriculum.
• It presents the content in an organised form.
• It is used for formal teaching in school.
• It is a written structure based on the subject matter.
• It is an important tool of teaching and learning.

Because the textbook is the basic material for reaching the curriculum's objectives, it has to be prepared with the student who will read it at the centre. Five things are kept in mind:

• The student's level of schooling: basic level or secondary level.
• The class: what a class 2 child understands is different from what a class 9 student understands.
• The standard: the language, the length of sentences and the depth of content match what the students can handle.
• Interest: examples, stories, pictures and activities that students enjoy are included.
• Need: the knowledge and skills the students will need in life and in the next class are included.

Think of a class 1 Nepali book and a class 10 Nepali book side by side. The first has large letters, bright pictures, short words and songs. The second has long lessons, poems, essays and grammar rules. Both are textbooks, and each was shaped for its own readers: their level, class, standard, interest and need. Hand the class 10 book to a class 1 child and the child learns nothing, because the book was never written for that child.

However good a textbook is, it cannot fulfil every objective of the curriculum by itself. Other resources are needed as well: library books, newspapers and magazines, maps, models, the experience of people in the community, field visits and experiments the students carry out themselves. A lesson on farming read in the textbook is understood far better once the class has walked to a nearby field and talked with a farmer.

Not every school has such resources, though. In schools that lack resources, the textbook itself is treated as the main material. In a remote village school with no library, no laboratory and no internet, the textbook may be the only reliable material the teacher and the students have. This is why the textbook holds a special importance in teaching and learning activities.

The points below show why the textbook is needed by the teacher, by the student and by the curriculum itself. A textbook is important because it is used:

• (a) as a supporting material to fulfil the objectives expected by the curriculum
• (b) as an important educational material that carries the content to the students
• (c) by the teacher, before making a lesson plan, to decide the specific objectives, teaching materials, teaching methods, classroom activities and homework
• (d) by students to prepare in advance and to get information about the content
• (e) to develop creative habits in students through exercises and activities
• (f) as a base for using the local environment and local materials
• (g) to help put student activities, group work and discussion among students into practice
• (h) as the basic material for evaluating students

These points are easier to hold in three groups. First, for the curriculum: the textbook fulfils its objectives and carries its content to the students. Second, for the teacher: when making a lesson plan, the teacher draws from the textbook what to teach, which materials to use, which method to follow, what activity to run in class and what homework to set. When students are evaluated, the questions are also based on the textbook's content. Third, for the student: the textbook lets a student read tomorrow's lesson today, build creative habits through its exercises, and work and discuss in groups with classmates.

Using the local environment is easiest to see with an example. If the textbook has a lesson on river pollution, the teacher can take the class to look at the stream near their own village. The textbook supplies the topic, and the local stream ties that topic to a place the students already know.

The curriculum covers every experience given to students, inside the school and outside it. It guides teaching and learning and fixes the objectives students must reach. It also includes the activities, teaching methods and ways of working that suit those objectives.

The textbook is taken as the medium through which the objectives set by the curriculum are fulfilled. It is an important tool of teaching and learning, and students use it formally. For this reason the textbook is treated as a supporting material of the curriculum. Put simply, the curriculum comes first and the textbook is written from it.

Compare it with building a house. The house plan fixes how many rooms there will be, where the doors go and how big the house is. Nobody can live inside a plan, yet without one the house is not built well. The curriculum is like the plan, and the textbook is like the walls raised according to it, the place where students actually do their learning.

The curriculum and the textbook are linked, but they are not the same thing. Reading the two cells of each row in the table below shows how they are related and how they differ, one point at a time.

The last row of the table gathers all the differences into one sentence. The curriculum is the theoretical side of the teaching plan, because it thinks out and fixes what is taught and why. The textbook is the practical side, because it is the thing students actually open, read, practise from and prepare for exams with.