Digital Textbooks: System of Choosing Between Physical, Digital to Cause Educational Disparities

Editorial

13:59 JST, February 15, 2025

Should textbooks be physical or digital? If the current system of focusing on physical textbooks is abandoned and the choice is left to local governments, it will amount to compulsory education being left entirely to local governments. The central government’s abandonment of its responsibility is unacceptable.

A working group of the Central Council for Education of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry has compiled an interim report, the pillar of which is a proposal to make digital textbooks, which are currently considered to be “alternative teaching materials,” into “official textbooks” that are subject to state screening and free distribution.

The current textbook system will be revised by fiscal 2026, with the aim of introducing the use of digital textbooks as official textbooks in fiscal 2030. The central government would allow local governments to choose one of three types of systems — using only physical textbooks, using only digital textbooks or using a combination of both types of textbooks.

Up until now, the central government has maintained a uniform system of compulsory education across the country, ensuring that students receive a certain standard of education. The introduction of a system to have local governments select which textbooks to use would be a major change from the current compulsory education system.

This is not an issue that can be decided by a working group, which is a subordinate body of the council. There should be a broad range of debates, including in a political setting, as to how compulsory education should be.

Digital textbooks have the advantage of being able to utilize video and audio, but there have been a spate of research reports showing that physical textbooks are superior for deep thinking and memorization. If the type of textbooks to be used differs from region to region, it could lead to various disruptions, including disparities in academic abilities among students.

Sweden, a pioneer country in digitization, has recently switched its policy to put an emphasis on physical textbooks and handwriting and is moving away from the use of digital textbooks. This is because adverse effects have been confirmed, namely children not being able to concentrate for long periods of time when using digital textbooks alone and not being able to think deeply.

Japan should not rush ahead with a policy that has already been proven to be problematic.

The ministry has said that the use of digital terminals is important for enhancing “individualized learning” that is tailored to each child’s academic ability, learning progress and characteristics. At the working group, there was also the opinion that “teachers also need to change.”

However, there are still strong concerns at schools about excessive digitization. If teachers are asked to change their teaching methods to suit devices, which are merely tools, without sufficient training, it would be a mistake of prioritizing the wrong thing.

In the first place, the majority of high school entrance exams are conducted using paper and pencil. For university admissions, examinations are conducted to uniformly measure the academic ability of the nearly 500,000 students, and students study for these exams.

The goal of the working group to use digital textbooks to provide individually tailored education is certainly far from these realities.

The priority should be to continue to leverage the benefits of digital textbooks as supplementary teaching materials. Lessons learned from “pressure-free education,” which seemed like a good idea in theory but did not work in the classroom, should not be forgotten, as it led to a decline in students’ academic abilities.

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Feb. 15, 2025)