Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Courtesy of the Arizona Sun, the Associated Press today carries a story headlined, "Arizona School Will Not Use Textbooks."

A high school in Vail will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans.

Vail Unified School District's decision to go with an all-electronic school is rare, experts say. Often, cost, insecurity, ignorance and institutional constraints prevent schools from making the leap away from paper.

[...]

But the move to laptops is not cheap. The laptops cost $850 each, and the district will hand them to 350 students for the entire year. The fast-growing district hopes to have 750 students at the high school eventually.

A set of textbooks runs about $500 to $600, [Vail schools superintendent Calvin] Baker said.

It's not clear how the change to laptops will work, he conceded.

"I'm sure there are going to be some adjustments. But we visited other schools using laptops. And at the schools with laptops, students were just more engaged than at non-laptop schools," he said.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just because I work professionally with computers (as computers, rather than as adjuncts to some other task), and am hence jaded. But I think this is an idea staggering in its stupidity.

That accusation comes in part from my take on the general computers-vs.-books debate, still (I think) a long way from being decided. In a nutshell, it goes like this:

• Books are more reliable than computers as carriers of complex information. Computers excel, naturally, at carrying around data. And thanks to tools like the Google Searchbar, a computer's user can easily locate a given datum in even the most complex document (like, say, a high-school textbook in e-book format). The problem is that the data so located comes to the user devoid of context. I can pluck from my computer all references to Talleyrand, say. Having found each reference, I can read a few paragraphs back and ahead of each reference, and sorta-kinda-like "know" who Talleyrand is, perhaps even sufficiently to convince an instructor that I know my history. But not having also read about the 100 years of European history leading up to Talleyrand's era ensures that I'll really know why Talleyrand was important.
  
• Books are more reliable than computers in general. A book doesn't need an AC power supply or a fully charged battery. It doesn't break down, or seize up and have to be restarted. It's easily read in bright light. A book won't screw up your eyesight or your posture, won't subject you to repetitive stress -- won't, in short, require that you conform to its requirements.
  
• Books are less conducive to their users' distraction than are computers. When you're reading a book, the only distractions are those outside the you-and-book boundaries. When you're using a computer, you must deal not only with those environmental distractions, but also those inherent in the medium. E-mail arriving, IM windows popping open, the games and Web sites present and soliciting your attention in a whispered voice to your subconscious, mouse and keyboard settings, CDs getting jammed in their readers...

Don't get me wrong; a computer can add lots of wonderful things to a course of study using traditional (and yes, hidebound) media. At the very least, being able to copy-and-paste text from its source, instantly locate a unique phrase, and "virtally annotate" electronic texts are all features not available if you're using just books.

But gad, to replace textbooks with laptops? No doubt someone got an attaboy for floating this boneheaded notion, and no doubt the kids (many if not most of them) will consider it a vast improvement -- although not for reasons related to scholarship. It's a triumph of immediacy over common sense, and God help us if a lot of school districts follow suit.

Update, 5:53pm: I just re-read the quotation from the AP article, above. This time around, the portion which leaped out at me was "Often, cost, insecurity, ignorance and institutional constraints prevent schools from making the leap away from paper." Institutional constraints, well, that may be. The other three roadblocks to adopting a computers-only curriculum are also legitimate, but for the wrong reasons.