AUGUST 19 — Each time I pick up my daughter from school, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m in some international airport terminal.
At least a third of the students coming out seem to be carrying bags which look like luggage huge enough to carry two months’ worth of clothes.
I hope the Education Ministry finds and implements whatever “holistic” solution it keeps saying we need.
Off the top of my head, I can think of, say, the use of school lockers so students don’t need to bring everything back and forth from home each day.
Problem is, some kids can and will lose their keys creating yet more paperwork, headaches and so on.
Or teachers could keep textbooks in class. This isn’t a bad idea, although the issue of space is going to crop up. With seven to eight subjects and about 30 to 40 students per class, each class may end up being a mini store-room of books.
I recall one of my secondary school teachers keeping all workbooks in the classroom, but not textbooks. Furthermore, there remains the problem of — surprise surprise — stealing. And whose fault would it be if a book isn’t in the cupboard anymore? Who’s going to pay?
The master solution: E-textbooks?
As far as a decade ago, American marketing guru Seth Godin had already proposed that all textbooks should take the form of pdf files, in one stroke removing the need for students to lug phone-book sized references.
As a former university student, I can appreciate this idea, especially given those monster texts from Paul Samuelson (Economics), Frank Wood (Accounting), Philip Kotler (Marketing) and many others.
The question is, can this work for our public schools?
Sadly, in most government schools, e-textbooks as an idea is dead out of the water because students aren’t allowed to bring devices to school.
If so, we’re truly stuck. Then again, maybe this is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone i.e. encourage digital learning in addition to eliminating the super-heavy schoolbag problem?
Tech guru Kevin Kelly talked about the screening phenomenon in which the future will consist of accessing information, images and messages from “wherever” (phone, office walls, traffic junctions, etc.), after which they can do mash-ups, share their work, etc.
In light of the advent of such a tech-soaked society, are physical textbooks really the best we can do? Shouldn’t the education sector be preparing our kids where the “book” is no longer delimited by physical binders, where information flows (from producer to producer) rather than remain static?
Isn’t the preference for physical textbooks (as opposed to e-textbooks) analogous to being stuck in an era of Encyclopædia Britannica (as opposed to Wikipedia)?
Finally, the wastage is a serious issue. Year after year, new copies (as in thousands and thousands of them) of the same books are printed then chucked away after the final exam.
It would appear the only beneficiary of that are the book-sellers; the rest of society picks up the cost of this externality.
And all because we refuse to make e-textbooks a social given?
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
