In essence, codified academic knowledge only has one purpose: to train students to think a certain way. Though schools strive to educate people so they can become the movers and shakers of tomorrow, the academic knowledge taught hasn’t truly done its job well unless the students move and shake the way the textbook tells them to. Individual thought, though not obsolete, takes on a whole new meaning when viewed through all the layers of “individual” thoughts that have gone before. For example, as discussed at length in Spurious Coin by Bernadette Longo, though Comenius was the first to implement the use of textbooks in a methodical educational fashion, he drew upon the traditions of those who had come before him. Most importantly, he was greatly influenced by Francis Bacon. Therefore, his books were largely designed to be tools used to further Bacon’s ideas. He took from the styles of the popular handbooks and books of secrets, as well as that of encyclopedias, and used these styles to organize Bacon’s previous work. Longo states that Bacon had “brought together trends from the printing industry, popular handbook literature, religion, and statecraft to devise a plan for elevating the place of mechanical arts within his culture” (34). Thus, though Comenius used this previous knowledge for his own purposes (or perhaps Bacon’s), he used it nevertheless. Knowledge then becomes something that is molded and shaped by already existing truths, which rise to the surface or sink beneath depending on the legitimacy given them. Continuing to look at Comenius, we see the ever repeating process of how codified knowledge directs knowing. Comenius, himself having received codified knowledge, recodes that knowledge into textbooks (a more concentrated form), and then this “new” knowledge, many times sifted through the sieve of codification, is laid open on students’ desks as pure and plain truth. And thus the cycle repeats itself. Cue zebra and giraffe chorus.
