Following the COVID-19
pandemic, the education system remained tapped due to lockdown restrictions.
But certain advanced technology measures were a breakthrough for the students
at their homes. Almost two years into online schooling and digital learning,
the ‘craze’ to try out features like web communication services, eBooks,
educational applications and other services that remained out of a student’s
reach for decades, has died down with children complaining of online classes
and widespread decision-making for the re-opening of schools.
Books were always the
most integral part of schools, and they still are; however, some people of
generation Z feel that the future of schools will be learning from computers,
simulators, smartboards, with pen and ink being Wi-Fi, and pages being screens.
But they don’t realise that the need of the hour is not replacement. It is
incorporation.
Online services using
advanced technological services have inevitably brought to front the problem of
memory retention and focus, where the litmus test lies two decades from now. A
school in Norway conducted a study to compare the memory retention of a short
story printed on a page, and that as a PDF of kindle. It concluded that out of
the 72 tenth graders tested, the students who read the story on paper had a
higher average of the test conducted on the story. It was reasoned that the motion
of text on scrolling destroyed the spatiotemporal markers in the students who
read on a screen, signifying that one the main objectives of books being source
of knowledge is that the human brain identifies and remembers the details more
effectively when it has a still object with various regions/markers of height
and width on a page acting as various rooms of a house full of information.
Besides increasing memory
retention, books inevitably increase the focus and concentration of readers,
simply because they are limited. One can find nothing else in a book except
those 300 pages. In contrast, a laptop has myriads of settings, customisation-features,
apps, and access to internet. These services make distraction no sweat, and the
overall efficiency of the reader decreases, even to a level that they manage to
read only a paragraph in an hour.
Books not only prove to
be better for scientific reasons, but they also have emotional attachments and
comforts. For instance, one must have surely realised by now that highlighting
and making notes on a screen is ten times more difficult that making notes on a
hardcopy. And there is an undeniable surreal happiness to note that the portion
of book on your left-hand side is more than what is to be read i.e. the
right-hand side. Even Paul Sweeney, a Scottish politician, has remarked:
“You know you’ve read a
good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a
friend.”
Books does not just prove
to be better. There are many loopholes in bringing laptops and Wi-Fi into the
schools. Who knows that a student might be playing a game or chatting on sites
when he is supposed to read the physics concept that would be discussed later.
Moreover, bringing laptops from might even result in an unhealthy competition
of one’s financial background. These services at school will not ameliorate the
limited scope of books, but will pave the path to no end of mischief instead.
Furthermore, students can
tell from experience that is often impossible to satiate their curiosity through
the internet, where either one gets the meaning of terminology typed, or gets
lengthy research papers written on that topic. A book is the only source of
appropriate answers to questions in a student’s mind. And besides this, who
thought that personalised advertisements of Amazon on websites could lure a
person, who wants to buy the same thing, into clicking there as easily as it
were offering a lollipop to a toddler.
Expanding out of the
scope of educational impacts, most people argue that more and more books
essentially cause deforestation. But this is where thought needs to be put, and
innovation is needed. It is worth noting that NCERT textbooks are made of
recycled paper, evident from the small threads and minute spots on the pages of
the books.
The essence of the
controversy is not to suggest that ‘Books win’ and ‘Computers lose’. It is to
revolutionise the education system for the better. Incorporation of
smartboards, air play, and simulators can undoubtedly take schooling to next
level. But saying that schools should stop using books and switch to advanced
technology is completely baseless, and almost as pointless as saying that
Olympics should stop having any sports events, and have all mathematics events
instead.
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