Inside South Africa's First Fully Digital Government School

An anonymous reader writes "State education in South Africa has been described as 'in crisis'. A recent report (pdf) says that even the top 20% of private schools only achieve the same results as the average in other middle income countries like Chile. In maths and science, teachers often can't answer and don't understand the questions they have to set their pupils. One government school in Johannesburg, however, has taken an enormously bold step and gone 'fully digital' in a move that others may follow. Since January, all pupils have been required to buy a tablet computer instead of textbooks — which, astonishingly, saves families around R500 ($50) in the first year and R1500 ($150) in subsequent years, a huge amount of money for many families there. The teachers are confident that that learning outcomes are better as well — and if the end of year tests in a month's time are positive, other schools may follow suit."

Comments

Re:"Saved" them money?

[evilviper]

If you think changing the book is to squeeze money out of you, and not... you know, because you've finished learning from it and need something else to learn, then you're in trouble. Using the same book year after year is probably one of the reasons the learning outcomes are so terrible

Back in college, I enrolled in the intro to C++ course in the summer semester, bought the book, and attended the first few classes, but had to drop it when I realized my course load was too heavy. I re-enrolled in the fall, no problem, only to find the C++ book had been updated to a new edition, which was almost exactly the same, but had changed the layout just enough that page numbers were completely out-of-whack, chapter numbers didn't quite match either, and there were a few small wording changes in some of the assignments that significantly changed them.

I wasn't too interested in buying another $60+ book, that I was previously told would be good for all three semesters of C++. As a result, those handful of us with the old books spent half the class tracking down what examples everyone else was looking at, and hours figuring out where to find the assignments we needed to complete, which were sometimes slightly different. Of course the teacher wasn't interested in the changes and just didn't want to be bothered. In the end, about half the people with the old books ended up buying new ones halfway through the class. And those of us who kept the old couldn't manage anything more than a C in that class.

It's many years of incidents like that which left me with very little respect for textbook publishers, college education, and teachers in general. Anything which undermines that horrible system, while actually providing a reasonable education, is aces in my book.