The government’s idea, still in the planning stage, of replacing textbooks with material taken directly from the Internet (so lightening the weight of schoolbags and pushing down the price of schoolbooks) has caused mixed reactions. Educational publishers and booksellers have two objections to this. First, they see the project as a death blow for an industry that provides work for thousands of people. While I sympathize with the publishers and booksellers, it’s also true that the same arguments could have been used by carriage builders, coachmen, and grooms on the advent of the steam train, or by textile workers, as indeed happened on the introduction of the mechanical loom. If history is moving inescapably in the direction determined by the government, this labor force ought to be finding alternative work, perhaps producing material for the Internet.
Their second objection is that the proposal envisages a computer for every pupil: it’s unlikely the state would saddle itself with such an expense, and if parents had to pay, the cost would be more than for the textbooks. On the other hand, if there were only one computer for each class, pupils would have little opportunity to use it for personal research, which is the intriguing aspect of this proposal. One computer per class would be about as beneficial as the government printing and distributing thousands of leaflets each morning, like handing out bread to the poor. There again, perhaps everyone will have a computer one day.
But the problem is another. The Internet is not going to replace books; it is simply a formidable complement, an incentive to read more books. The book is still the main tool for providing and transmitting knowledge (what would pupils study on a day when there’s a blackout?), and textbooks are the first priceless opportunity to teach children how to use a book. Moreover, the Internet provides a fantastic store of information but offers no filters, whereas education is about not only transmitting information but also teaching the criteria for selecting it. This is the role of a teacher, but it is also the function of a schoolbook, which is an example of a selection made from the great sea of all possible information. This is true even of the worst textbook, and here the teacher must criticize its one-sidedness and provide supplementary information from a different point of view. Unless pupils are taught that culture is not accumulation but discrimination, then what they’re learning is not education but mental clutter.
Some pupils when interviewed said, “Great, so we can print out only the pages we need and not carry around those we don’t have to study.” Wrong. I remember in my rural secondary school, which operated more or less on alternate days during the last year of World War II, the teachers, the only ones in my whole school and university career whose names I’ve forgotten, didn’t teach me a great deal. Instead, I spent my time leafing through my poetry anthology, and that was how I first came across the poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Eugenio Montale. It was a revelation; I was introduced to a new world. The value of a schoolbook is that it provides a chance to discover something the teacher has not taught, whether through idleness or lack of time, and that someone else considered fundamental.
The textbook also remains a poignant and useful past record of school years, whereas a few printed sheets for immediate use, which are continually slipping to the floor and get tossed away after a few underlinings—that’s true for us academics, so it’s bound to be true for pupils as well—would leave no trace on the memory. It would be a great loss.
Books could certainly be lighter and less expensive were it not for the color illustrations. It would be sufficient for a book to explain who Julius Caesar was, and then it would be interesting for anyone with their own computer to look for pictures of Julius Caesar or contemporary reconstructions of Rome, for diagrams that explain how a Roman legion was organized. Even better if the book suggested a few reliable websites and further areas of study, so that pupils could embark on a personal adventure, but the teacher would need to show them how to distinguish between serious and reliable sites and those that are cobbled together and superficial.
Lastly, though abolishing textbooks is a bad idea, the Internet could certainly replace dictionaries, which weigh down schoolbags more than anything else. Downloading a dictionary in Latin, Greek, or any other language would be useful and fast.
But everything should always revolve around the book. It’s true that our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, once claimed he hadn’t read a novel in twenty years, but schools don’t have to teach pupils how to become prime minister—at any rate, not like this one.
2004