Sources of Authority in the Language of the School: A Response to “Beyond Criticism”

Abstract

Luke, de Castell, and Luke (1983) do a considerable service in their attempt to show that the authority of written texts, school textbooks in particular, derive not only from the particular linguistic properties of the texts themselves-their explicitness and impersonality for example-but also from the social or institutional contexts in which those texts are owned, taught, and studied. Texts, they say, are above criticism primarily because the social institutions-governments and schools-authorize them. Moreover, the properties of texts that I identified as being the source of their authority are, in fact, they say, primarily to justify the authority of social institutions-forms of schools, forms of government, forms of religion, and the like-which they say are indeed beyond criticism. So that the meaning and authority of textbooks that I describe are, in fact, meaning and authority of the institutions that mediate those texts. To oversimplify, I discuss the internal or intrinsic structure of the texts that are taught, studied, and consulted, while they discuss the external social structures that teachers, texts and children are inserted into. I think that they would, if pressed, agree that the authority of teachers and schools could not exist without a of some form-a body of knowledge or procedures, a sacred tradition, or a fixed oral or written text which would provide the basis for instruction in the first place. I also think they would agree that those texts are refined or specialized to serve their social functions. Prayers, for example, differ from encyclopedias. On my side, if pressed, I would have to admit that an obsolete textbook, even if it had all the requirements of explicitness and impersonality, would not have authority if it was not adopted by some school, teacher, writer, or student. We can see that both a certain kind of text and a certain social organization are important to the ceding of authority to a teacher or a text. But just what is the relation between the internal and the external, the text and the context?