What do Bill and Melinda Gates think of textbooks?

Point number eight in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual report highlights the obsolescence of textbooks as a learning tool, pointing out that today’s technology offers more efficient and attractive ways for children and young people to learn.

No doubt about it: you only have to look at the work of numerous developers working on learning tools to see that textbooks are uncomfortable and unattractive, provide no feedback, and encourage students to rely on a single source. Tools such as Spain’s Smartick for the study of mathematics between the ages of four and 14 provide infinitely more attractive ways to learn one of the most problematic subjects in the education system, usually due to poor teaching practices.

As I have argued repeatedly, in today’s world, it is absurd to rely on a single source of knowledge: learning must reinforce the critical thinking needed to be able to find information from different sources. Replacing textbooks with apps or programs might be an attractive solution, but it still runs into the same problems. Instead, we have to help students acquire their own materials, forcing them to search for and select them, educating them in the necessary criteria to carry out that selection, under the right supervision. Exposing students to a wide variety of sources, with different criteria of depth, bias, style or accuracy, helps train critical faculties and is something they will have to do over the course of their lives: find information and assess it.

One of the main problems with textbooks is that they are vulnerable to editorialization, to biases of all kinds. In today’s environment, we need to take into account the many sources available through the internet, exposing students to a wide variety of criteria, rather than a single source provided by a publisher or a government. Only by educating critical thinking, by developing search criteria and submitting students to a wide range of sources can we hope to help them spot fake news and manipulation through hypersegmentation: looking beyond an attractive or intriguing headline, recognizing bias and using tools to contrast or verify a source must begin with an open source education, even if it means points of view we consider beyond the pale. Textbooks can never do this.

Obviously, all this requires access to technology: without an internet connection, this approach is impossible and textbooks of any type will seem a luxury. Fortunately, technology is advancing rapidly and entry barriers are falling, meaning we need to think about the educational environments of the future, where we will need to design ways for students to leverage the possibilities of permanently connected smartphones, tablets and computers, something that will require education in their correct use. The French approach will get us nowhere. The schools of the future won’t ban smartphones, but instead encourage students to use them at all times, providing charging points on every desk.

The function of education is to prepare students for the world they will grow up in. This is a world hyper-abundant in information requiring critical faculties to sort the wheat from the chaff: technology will be everywhere and provides many more educational possibilities than obsolete textbooks can. The sooner we consign them to the past, the sooner we demand that schools start using today’s technology to educate our children.

(En español, aquí)