The first school book that I remember was my mother’s school textbook. It was from 1938. Strangely, I don’t remember what it said. Even then, what I couldn’t read was much more interesting to me: the many paragraphs and entire pages that had been made illegible with black printer’s ink and that had apparently been quickly blacked out by the publisher before delivery. The scholastic extermination of Jewish authors as preparation for the real extermination!
From my own elementary school days there are two textbooks that I still have, the catechism and the biblical story. One was to read, the other to memorize: the Ten Commandments, the Five Deadly Sins, the Six Basic Truths, the Seven Works of Mercy… The only secular textbook I remember from elementary school was “Entrance Examination Made Easy”, which was first published in 1949 by the Österreichischer Bundesverlag and was then used by many prospective high school students for decades. The earl’s son and the children of the teacher and the chamber secretary had it. I never owned it and went to the entrance exam without this preparation. The results were correspondingly bad. But still: I passed.
In high school there were of course school books, the Liber Latinus, as well as arithmetic and reading books, encyclopedias and atlases. In the realia, on the other hand, textbooks were hardly ever used. Perhaps the teachers did not trust them and preferred to present the material themselves, which had to be carefully written down. School books were expensive. They were borrowed from the school library or mostly taken over by classmates and passed on again. Who had a less tattered copy? Who could possibly even afford a new one?
“The students benefited”
Writing, scribbling, dabbing, or damaging textbooks in any way was considered sacrilegious. Even today I have a holy reluctance to write anything in books. It was a courageous step by the Kreisky government to make textbooks free for all students from 1972, even if it was often branded as a waste of resources. The students have benefited. But the publishers were even happier.
School books are a treasure full of knowledge, but even more full of memories, and always a mirror of the time. But they are also a political issue, ever since Maria Theresia gave the impetus for founding the Austrian Federal Publishing House in 1772, which is celebrating its anniversary this year. Maria Theresa had to recognize how weak the huge Habsburg monarchy had become compared to the much smaller Prussia, not only militarily and economically, but above all also in terms of education.
Coming to terms with the Nazi era …?
With the introduction of general compulsory education in 1774 – it wasn’t really compulsory yet – textbooks also became a state matter. They always remained a political issue, wedged between state and church, in the monarchy, in the First Republic, in the corporative state and especially in National Socialism. So far, the school book publishers have not accepted any responsibility for the virtual erasures and hate speech that took place in the school books between 1938 and 1945. You have only done your duty and implemented the political guidelines. This was also not mentioned in the many speeches and greetings on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Austrian Federal Publishing House. It is therefore very welcome that the owners have now also announced this refurbishment.
In 2002, it was undoubtedly a fatal decision by the Schüssel government to relinquish direct access to textbook production and initially to sell 53 percent to the German Klett publishing house. The Austrian Federal Publishing House has been in German hands since 2007: a resource went abroad that is at least as important as the fertilizer division, the sale of which to the Czech Republic is just about to take place.
We don’t know how the school books will continue. There was a lot of talk about hybrid learning in the speeches. From the digitization of our school knowledge. The öbv managing director Maximilian Schulyok no longer speaks of knowledge, but only of skills: It has been shown that Corona was the most effective educational reform. It is doubtful whether all teachers and parents would agree with him. What happens to our textbook knowledge? It comes from the cloud and goes to the cloud.
Source: Nachrichten
