Digital Textbooks: Why Is Government Hastily Expanding Their Use?

Editorial

14:54 JST, September 11, 2024

The learning effects of digital textbooks have not yet become clear. The development of the communications environment is also lagging. Under these circumstances, it is hard to believe that there is a need to expand the use of digital textbooks all at once.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry recently held the first meeting of a working group of the Central Council for Education to promote the use of digital textbooks.

The ministry said that the meeting was intended to deal with future events regarding the renewal of the content of textbooks in accordance with the revision of the curriculum guidelines and the updating of computers distributed to students nationwide by the government in a full-fledged manner.

At the first meeting, the ministry presented five proposals, including “replacing all printed textbooks with digital ones.” It is obvious that the ministry intends to significantly expand the use of digital textbooks.

It was decided in 2022 that digital textbooks will be used in combination with printed ones, and digital textbooks were introduced this school year for English and part of math and arithmetic from fifth-grade elementary school students to third-year students at junior high schools.

While digital textbooks are expected to play a role in helping children understand through sounds and visual images, they are considered to be unsuitable for deep thinking and memory retention. In the end, the ministry came to the conclusion that printed textbooks are also important and the use of digital textbooks should be limited.

It has been only two years since then, and the full-fledged use of digital textbooks just started this school year. Under such circumstances, how much has the situation changed?

In 2022, the ministry released the results of its “verification” that digital textbooks are “as effective as or more effective than printed ones,” but the verification results also lacked clear evidence.

In addition, the communications environment has not been progressing. Teachers feel most inconvenienced when they have to deal with error messages in digital textbooks, according to the verification. Some teachers also pointed out other negative effects, such as students focusing on operations unrelated to the class and the worsening of their eyesight.

Don’t communications go down when too many users flock to a site as a result of the expanded use of digital textbooks? What should be done in the event of a disaster or system failure? There is no end to the concerns.

Education is an extremely human activity that nurtures people. Switching to mainly using digital textbooks without sufficient verification of the textbooks that form the basis of education will lead to serious problems in the future. It is desirable that digital textbooks will play only a supplementary role to printed ones, and that efforts will be made to achieve synergistic effects.

The ministry’s working group does not include academics and other experts who oppose the digitization of textbooks. This seems to be a predetermined conclusion.

Discussions regarding the tools needed for children to learn, which return to the basics of education, are indispensable, rather than the logic of government bodies, such as the revision of the curriculum guidelines, the updating of computer devices and obtaining budgets for those purposes.

It is said that when people read a printed book, while turning the pages they remember the content along with information such as the feel of the book and the quality of the paper. If the culture of paper is abandoned and children’s ability to think is adversely affected, it would be an irreversible situation.

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Sept. 11, 2024)