Textbooks' Role in Secondary Education in Georgia, the Postmodern Era

The paper presents a study of the role textbooks play in secondary education in Georgia in the postmodern era. A textbook theory which was formed by the middle of the 20th century, its main provisions, served the basis for the study of various representations of school textbooks' functions: informational, transformational, systematizing, motivational, the function of students' orientation towards cognitive activity, the function of developing students' cognitive abilities based on their mastering the skills of cognitive activity and gradually increasing the level of their cognitive independence, integrating, coordinating, developing and educational. An attempt has been made to study the influence of postmodernistic ideas on the development of school education in Georgia, its educational and methodological support, the central component of which is a textbook. The authors reveal a shift in the goal of education under the influence of postmodern thinking from teaching academic knowledge and skills to providing a learning environment where students create their own knowledge. They analyzed tutorial layouts for the 9th grades students of Georgian schools, posted on the official portal of the Center of Textbook Marking and justified the conclusion that the invariant function of the textbook, which includes a book for the student, a book for the teacher, a workbook and a disk with audio recordings, is the function of developing students' independent work in the informational space, search, and encouraging students to independently construct knowledge