Schools Without Books?
In what seems like a life time ago, I was hired by
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill to co-author a new science textbook for them. It was to be written for middle school sixth
graders, part of a new science series.
It had a red cover with the photo of a space walking astronaut as the
main focus. When you write such a text,
you are also responsible for creating not just the body of the text, but the
teaching materials, activities, lesson plan suggestions, tests and teacher’s
edition as well as the student text. It
was a gang of work and took most of a year.
The money was good, but I wouldn’t do it again.
Evidently, the
time of those paper textbooks is coming to an end. In an article by Justin B. Hollander in the New York Times, Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, has declared that textbooks should be
replaced by digital learning technologies, e-readers, the internet, Web sites,
etc. Duncan
Both
Hollander, and I agree that digital media have a useful and growing role to
play in modern education. But we both
also have some reservations about throwing, “hard copy” learning into the trash
heap and lighting a match.
The
thrust of the article (which I highly recommend) is that change for the sake of
change is short-sighted and frequently only partially right if not out-right
wrong. He notes, by way of example, that
when the car became popular we trashed our mass transit systems, only to find
we need them now. He also points out
that the research on how well students learn via digital media is sketchy,
inconclusive and incomplete. As an
educator who has studied the brain, I know that young children respond to
multiple stimuli which include a strong bias toward the tactile. For that reason I believe that paper is a
necessary medium.
Schools
are not going to save money on e-readers either. They are going to need an e-reader for each
student, keep it up-graded and in good repair.
Have you seen what the textbooks look like after a year back and forth
in the backpack? This is going to be an
expensive proposition.
There
is also the fact that a book on a shelf is always available for reference. No electricity, no batteries, no need to
connect with an internet—it is there for anyone to pick up and use. Like Abe Lincoln, we can read them by
candlelight. How many pictures of your
family would you have if you could no longer call up the digital images on the
computer? You get my point. We have books that are thousands of years old. Paper deteriorates, but it seems to have a
longer shelf life than floppy disks.
Books of all kinds are a lasting, affordable, easily accessed source of
both entertainment and information.
I have one more concern which Mr.
Hollander does not mention. When I hear
Arne Duncan talking about educating our students using digital learning, I want
to know who is feeding information into the machine at the source. Call me jaundiced, broken and bitter, but I
don’t trust anyone in government to make that decision. I trust science texts produced by members of
NSTA. I trust mathematics texts produced
by members of NCTM. Have you tried to
read anything produced by the federal government? Thank you!
Walk cautiously into the future and
keep the faith.
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