Time to let technology take the load off a studentÕs back

Date Published: {J}

The morning of the first full day of secondary school and the shoulder strap on the twelve year old’s brand new bag containing half a tonne of new books is already hanging by a thread from complete detachment.

Not surprising really, given that said bag – admittedly, at thirty quid, one of the few value purchases of this move to ‘free’ second-level education – contains around €400 worth of books, jotters, hard-back notebooks (none of your cheap flexi-covers here) and other accoutrements.

This isn’t about the bag because you get what you pay for – it’s about the cost of kitting out a child for secondary school in Ireland. And while we all know university takes this laughable notion of free education to new heights, we have a few years yet before that’s our problem.So let’s concentrate on second-level for now.

The bag ripped last week because the school hadn’t allocated lockers on day one, which might seem strange in that putting the name of a student on a little box hardly qualifies as the cutting edge of forward planning – but then, in fairness, it can be hard to motivate yourself for a return to work after three months of a summer holiday.And of course there’s a real danger that, if you give the locker away before you get your hands on the €15 rental charge from the parents, those dodgy freeloaders might never pay at all.

Thankfully the locker problem has now been resolved and the €15 is resting gently in the school account – but the quantity of the books to be carried on a twelve year old’s back every evening for homework remains an issue.

So here’s a solution that might actually bring us into the modern era, put chiropractors on a three day week, drive those school book companies who make a small fortune to refocus their selling technique and ultimately save all parents a few bob on books over the course of a five or six year cycle.

Why not get rid of books altogether and install all reading and work material on a laptop computer, which these days can be purchased for around €500 – or roughly the cost of one year’s school books and materials?

If the cost proves the problem, perhaps the state would underwrite this plan and parents could pay €100 a year over the course of second level education.

All material could be downloaded via Wi-Fi – installed and paid for in every school by the state – and even if families didn’t have this facility at home, any laptop allows you to work offline so that your homework is completed before returning to the classroom in the morning.

If classrooms need to be brought up to date, let the Government fund that too – some classrooms have interactive white boards which can be fully integrated with laptops, allowing students to show their work on screen in a far more efficient and beneficial way than a teacher taking home a pile of copies.

Of course it might increase the risk of copying homework – cutting and pasting is a lot easier than having to write the whole thing out – but a few well-placed questions from any teacher worth his or her salt should determine whether or not a student did the work or just did the copying.

Naturally there would be a cost involved in putting the syllabus material together somewhere down the line and perhaps parents would have to pay a small fee for that.

Or the government could reallocate responsibilities within the Civil Service so that, say, the woefully under-employed workers with typing skills in the planning office would be moved to the Department of Education to key in whatever changes are necessary to update the course reading material during any given summer.

An added bonus of all this would be the environmental impact of saving countless trees in trying to keep up with an ever-changing syllabus – which might have us all in agreement with the An Taisce groupie John Gormley for once, and that would be worth the effort all on its own. And it appears there’s already a similar pilot scheme running in Cavan.

By all accounts, we’re already been ripped off royally on the cost of school books.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.