Thereâ€™s nothing more boring or conventional than a textbook, but two hundred years ago they were as cutting-edge as a MOOC, and augured a revolution in the way we think about knowledge.

â€œA textbook is something anyone can read no matter who they are or where theyâ€™re from. It allows education to occur on a global, universal scale,â€� says Hansun Hsiung, a fourth-year graduate student at Harvard University who studies the rise and spread of textbooks in late-18th century Europe and Japan.

Before textbooks, learning typically happened through the dialogic methodâ€”exchanges between students and professors. But beginning in the 18th-century, scholars began redacting blocks of information into standardized books that laid out content in logical, easily digestible fashion. The goal of the textbook, according to one 18th-century French pedagogue, was to â€œmake all truths universally familiar, and spare [ourselves] any useless effort in learning.â€�

The modern day textbook wars have taught us, of course, that one manâ€™s universal truth can be another manâ€™s heresy. Hsiung explains that these types of concerns were present with textbooks from the start. 18th-century Europeans worried about who had the authority to write textbooks and, as textbooks took hold, there was a backlash against the idea that a real education could take place through a book. In this way, textbooks spawned similar concerns to the ones we grapple with around MOOCsâ€” that itâ€™s dangerous to have a single, massively popular online course dominate the way a particular subject is taught, and that thereâ€™s only so much learning that can take place through a computer.

Other concerns were more particular to the geopolitical context in which textbooks developed. As the European textbook market grew increasingly competitive, publishers started selling their books in the colonies and in Japan. But after awhile they began to wonder whether there was more to exporting knowledge than shipping books.

â€œIn the second half of the 19th-century people are much more concerned about how to tailor knowledge to local circumstances,â€� says Hsiung. â€œThey get concerned about the fact that perhaps textbooks being used by British children arenâ€™t suitable for children in Calcutta.â€�

Today debates about textbooks are alive and well, but the central role textbooks perform in American education would seem to be secure. And while students may malign their hefty textbooks as dull and boring, such criticisms are a sign that textbooks have in fact accomplished what their inventors hoped they would: Here is all the important knowledge in the world, whether you like it or not.