Bring back textbooks

Bring back textbooks, write Sophie Winkleman and David James in The Spectator.

In Britain, as in the U.S., schools have embraced online learning and "one-to-one" devices, they write. Students swipe and scroll between tabs, "some educational and some not," while the teacher tries to keep the class "on task."

Textbooks "are slandered as boring compared with online resources, which offer video clips, audio, 3D modelling and other seductive 21st-century ‘essentials’," they write. But textbooks enable students to concentrate. They provide "a stable source of information."

Textbooks also beat screens in that they don’t damage eyesight, disrupt hormones, delay sleep, trigger headaches, affect spinal formation and exacerbate symptoms of ADHD and autism, as screens do.

Textbooks don't crash or run out of battery, write Winkleman and James. They are "far easier to navigate than multiple apps, enable longer and calmer periods of focus, help develop essential skills (such as notetaking) and, because pupils read from a physical page, are far more conducive to delivering knowledge that sticks."

Textbooks had many detractors in olden days. Many were poorly written, assembled by a committee. When publishers decided to pep up textbooks and beef up "mentions" of minorities and women, they added sidebars -- lots of sidebars -- that distracted students from the main text. Books got thicker and thicker to satisfy the preferences of various states. They were very heavy.

But it was a lot easier for students to study from a textbook, and for parents to look at the book to see what their children were supposed to be learning.