The school textbook as a place of hermeneutics

Abstract

High school textbooks are never a neutral list of facts, nor can they be classified merely on the basis of pedagogic criteria (ease of reading, completeness of the presentation, etc.). Each textbook offers an interpretation of the subject that it presents, which is distinct, and sometimes at odds with that of other textbooks.
This obvious and usually neglected observation is particularly relevant for philosophy textbooks. This article discusses the hermeneutical and interpretative complexity that accompanies the Italian textbook tradition through the case of Plato and in the awareness that the textbook still represents, in distance and blended learning, one of the three vertices of the epistemic/didactic triangle, a vertex that we should not disown.