A sociology professor in the north of England began chopping up index cards on his kitchen table sometime between the third lecture on Frankfurt School critical theory and the fourth student email inquiring as to whether Habermas would be on the exam. For almost ten years, he had been using the same curriculum. The majority of the class had not touched the textbook, which was a doorstop ninth edition co-authored by Anthony Giddens, and it was sitting on a shelf above him. He had done the math. By week six, perhaps four of the twenty-eight students had figured it out. He could see it in their faces as the others were silently drowning.
Instead, what he created appeared almost absurd. Each of the little cardstock rectangles contained three keywords, a date, a one-line provocation, and the face of a single theorist. Adorno on one. Giddens on the other. Butler, in a drawing created by a student who subsequently acknowledged that the pose was lifted from a 2014 Guardian profile. Reading was not intended to be replaced by the cards. They were designed to give the impression that reading was feasible. To be fair, the majority of academics have forgotten that there is a difference.
Since it lost faith in students, the textbook industry has never fully recovered. Any introductory sociology book published within the last fifteen years will follow the same format: learning objectives printed in violet ink, glossaries repeated three times, and chapters filled with summary boxes. The writing is defensive. The author gives up first because they believe the reader will give up as well. Despite its scholarly scope, Giddens and Sutton’s edition is not an exception. Every paragraph has the publisher’s hand hovering over it, polishing it.
As a result, the reaction was unexpected when the cards began to circulate in seminar rooms, WhatsApp groups, and a tiny, still-operational area of academic Twitter. It was referred to as gimmicky by older coworkers. Some described it as embarrassing. However, by all accounts, the students began to read. It was the essays that the cards pointed to, not just the cards themselves, which were never the point. It turns out that if a little piece of cardboard indicates which four pages are important, a student who would never have opened Dialectic of Enlightenment will read four of its pages.
As we watch this unfold, it seems as though we have been thinking about education in reverse for a very long time. It has been assumed that seriousness must appear serious and that depth necessitates bulk. A deck of cards could never convey rigor the way a nine-hundred-page book does. However, rigor and length are not the same. It was never the case. No one accused Frank Webster of being superficial because he was able to evaluate the entire intellectual architecture of the information society in a book that most students could finish in a weekend.
The professor has now created decks for media theory, gender studies, and the hazy area where Butler and Foucault overlap. He would prefer not to be identified, in part due to his modesty and in part because his department head is still dubious. He prints them at a nearby store. The proprietor has begun inquiring about Adorno’s identity. The professor claims that the entire project was worthwhile just because of that conversation.
As the attention economy continues and the textbook market trembles, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that there has been a change in the actual flow of knowledge. It’s possible that the forms we trust don’t actually work. No one knows if a deck of cards will be the teaching tool of the future. However, it’s doing something that the textbook stopped doing long ago. It is being read.
