School Ideals suffering through Hyperinflation

Every day when I drop off my children at the local public school, I see armies of their fellow schoolmates swarming the school in the morning trailing rolling backpacks. This daily performance reminds me of the photos I saw, when I was back in school, of Germans pushing wheelbarrows of cash to buy a loaf of bread during Germany's period of hyperinflation (historical photo on this web page).

I couldn't help imagining, with information so fluid in this digital age, why these "digital natives" were toting around so many reams of paper, cardboard, and larger books than ever before. (The books are larger because they need the color photos, illustrations, and aesthetic white space to keep the interest of today's youth). The children also must tote writing paper, writing tools, parent-teacher correspondence, etc. It seems so obvious that a single electronic device would do well for them, as envisioned by the OLPC group. And, because the information is paper based (like Germany's paper money which they kept printing more and more of thinking that more of the printed stuff would solve their problems), it's value to the students and society is decreasing exponentially even while the student is exerting energy, consuming time, losing their posture, and losing skeletal structural soundness while dragging the stuff around.

Obviously this "burden of Atlas" on the students is designed to benefit the schools and the curriculum designers rather than the students themselves. Why not have small booklets for each chapter (like Singapore Math)? Or, one set textbooks for home and one set for school? The cost for the school is for the benefit of the publishers of the book rather than in the actual cost of the manufacturing of it. The publishers even add the extra cost to the schools to make the covers glossy, colorful, and sparkled and then the schools make the children immediately cover th book so the children don't damage them. Even still, they get pencil marking and normal wear and tear. The children should be eager to markup and "tag" the content (in a del.icio.us sense) to make it more personal and interesting and make it their own, but they're told "thou shalt not!"

I've never understood how educational organizations expect the students to internalize and value the knowledge they're learning, if they cannot permanently own the information on the medium by which it's deliver to them. "Look but don't touch" their told. I think all they are told they need to know should be part of their life long portfolio. Even after school, if what they've learned becomes known to the school to be outdated, the school should update their former student's life long portfolio with the corrected information. If the schools don't follow up, did they really want all their students from the beginning to know "the truth" of the world around them? It's certainly easier and less expensive to do this digitally.

If the knowledge and skills which the schools teach are so important that the students are expected to remember them for the rest of their lives, why is that information copyrighted? Why are schools so dependent on copyrighted materials if this knowledge and these skills are so important and so pervasive and essential in society? Anyone should be able to teach this stuff and generate the materials from memory. I'm being just a little sarcastic at the irony.

I like how Seymour Paper tried to reformulate the issue in terms of trying to compare "paper based" learning with "digit content based" learning and compare them as just different mediums rather than "new and expensive" vs. "old and trusted". We can then evaluate them in terms of whom each medium benefits, who really pays for it, and who endures the non-monetary costs.