“Our textbooks today are much more focused on practical things.”
The student’s comment, offered in a class on world language pedagogy as we discussed historical examples of language textbooks, stood out as requiring more response than I quite knew how to pack into the moment. It was true and it was false, depending on the meanings we poured into the word “practical.” It was offered by a thoughtful student as a starting observation, not as a dismissive judgment. The task of unpacking it invited reflection on what we think is real and where we think we live.
We had just spent some time exploring the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), a celebrated second-language textbook authored by Comenius.1 It offers 150 chapters ranging across birds, fish, and insects, home building and hospitality, the social status of farm laborers, the dynamics of patience and despair, ethics and religion, warfare, and shipwreck, finally concluding with a chapter on the day of judgment. The scope of its topics and interests sprawls beside the tighter focus on personal interests and consumer needs that tends to shape present-day introductory language texts. I knew what my student was getting at. For most language learners, knowing how to pay at a restaurant and describe their weekend does seem a great deal more practical than being able to describe the feeding habits of the hoopoe and name farm implements. The language provided these days is more about successfully navigating immediate material and social needs than about a grand account of how the world is put together.
Yet if we pause to consider context, the judgment of superior practicality becomes more complicated. For the claim to be driven by practical concerns, to be relevant to student needs, to be preparing students for the real world is both commonplace and slippery.
In fact, Comenius explains in the introduction to the Orbis Pictus that his textbook is founded entirely on practicality and real-world relevance. Education, he says, should contain “nothing … but such as is beneficial to one’s life.”2So why is the hoopoe there? Well, what counts as beneficial? The benefit to be sought through learning, he urges, is the wisdom to live well. Learning will be successful “if the mind be polished for wisdom, the tongue for eloquence, and the hands for a neat way of living. This will be that grace of one’s life, to be wise, to act, to speak.” The world that learners will have to navigate is a divine theater in which they need to know how to pursue constructive employment, how to appreciate and care for their neighbor and for non-human creatures, how to live with suffering, how to respond to beauty, how to pursue virtue, and where to place their trust. In a world that calls us to love and faces us with both catastrophe and accountability, developing an ethically and spiritually informed practical wisdom is a pressing need.
After the Orbis Pictus we looked at The London Vocabulary (1711).3 In some ways it is derivative of the Orbis Pictus, yet the number of words and topics has been radically slashed in the name of practicality. James Greenwood, the author, assures us in the preface that he has eliminated “everything that is not of immediate Use.”4 If we focus only on what is useful, he says, we will not need the “vast heap of words” contained in earlier works. For “why should a person that is to be prepared for the reading of Corderius, Phædrus, &c. be led through a croud of Modern Barbarism, and loaded with a Multitude of Words, which the Romans never heard of; and so consequently will never be met with in any Classic or good Latin Author?” Who needs those modern words? Clearly the goal has radically shifted; we are aiming less for a holistic practical wisdom than for the capacity to read classical literature. Accordingly, “care has been taken to let no Word come in here, but what is purely Roman, and has the Authority of some one or more of the Classic Authors.” So much for the Hoopoe.
The copy of Kontakte (a current first-year German textbook) that still sits on my shelf after past classroom use is the fifth edition from a few years back.5 The instructor’s notes for the second chapter, titled “Possessions and Pleasures,” note that the guiding focus is “the [students’] immediate environment outside the class, i.e. things they have, things they would like to have, and what they like to do.”6 That is an eloquent id est. Apparently the “immediate environment” contains no birds or insects, no ethical reflection or patient suffering, no problematic treatment of workers, and certainly no works by Roman authors, just things we bought or would like to buy and pastimes we enjoy. The world is but a consumer idyll, who knew?
This is the kind of textbook my student identified as “much more focused on practical things.” But a lot hangs on what we mean by “practical.”
At the moment, I am working to increase my Czech vocabulary. I have several language-learning apps on my devices and am working with some of them daily. Several strive to be practical, asking me to practice saying that I need a taxi, asking when the drug store closes, or checking the price of the sunglasses. These are for me the least useful resources, the least practical and relevant. My purpose for learning Czech is access to some untranslated seventeenth-century texts. The vocabulary of the modern tourist is almost entirely impractical for my needs. Reading the Gospels in Czech is proving much more relevant, not least because the texts in question quote Scripture often. My learning goals are of course uncommon, not a great bet for an app developer’s business model. Yet uncommon as they are, my goals shape my sense of what is practical.
Noticing that different advocates for useful learning have different worlds in mind does not in itself justify or negate any of the options. But it might help clarify what kind of discussion is underway. I have heard the comment that in the end, students have to be prepared for the “real world” used by educators to justify moves ranging from specific choices of curriculum content to arguably abusive teacher behaviors; life won’t be fair “out there in the real world.” (I continue to find it bizarre how often even educators themselves speak as if the classroom and its investment in human formation were not part of the real world, but that’s another discussion). The “real world” becomes the mythical outside, the story about what ineluctably counts, the prophesied future that demands allegiance.
Such visions of real-world practicality are often evoked as if the real world spoke to us with one inexorable voice, as if we were not in fact choosing which facets of a rich, complex, and changing reality to place at the center of our vision. The claim that everything boils down to economics, or to getting ahead, or to grad school, or to outperforming the opposition, or to technical competence, is in each case a faith and a selection, perhaps motivated by pressing circumstances, but nonetheless not simply a given. Facile appeals to the real world invite pointed questions. Which facets of reality are you choosing to notice, and which are you passing over in silence? Why should I believe that your chosen facets should drive our energies? Am I being asked to believe that they are unchanging and necessary, to be conformed to rather than resisted? Why should I think that the learning context should be decisively shaped by the different life context that you have in mind? If compelling answers are forthcoming, then we have a real conversation. If not, we have mostly an attempt to bypass thought.
It seems to me worth recognizing that a call to be practical is an implied proposal about what we should be doing, and that such proposals in turn imply faith-informed visions of what life requires of us. Invocations of the real world, of practicality, of relevance used as framing devices for educational choices are often dust jackets selling a perpetually shifting story about the nature of the world we live in. Insisting that this be acknowledged when we talk about the practicality of learning is neither a call for impracticality nor a rejection of the value of any specific set of skills. It is just a request for honesty about the beliefs that are being proposed when learning is justified by bald appeal to the practical and the real.
Footnotes
- John Amos Comenius, Joh. Amos Comenius’s Visible World, trans. Charles Hoole, London: John Sprint, 1705.
- ibid. All quotations here are from the unpaginated preface.
- James Greenwood, The London Vocabulary, English and Latin. 3rd Edition. (London: A. Bettesworth, 1713).
- Ibid., all quotations here are from the preface, p. ii-v.
- Tracy D. Terrell, Erwin Tschirner, & Brigitte Nikolai, Kontakte: A Communicative Approach, 5th edition, (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004).
- Ibid., 79.