AS I witnessed friend's children trudging home from school, carrying a large part of the Brazilian rain forest with them in the form of books costing over 500 for each child, I thought there MUST be a better way, and there is!
The solution is the Netbook computer which is a highly compacted, scaled-down version of the laptop. It weighs just one kilo, has a 10 inch screen and wireless access to the internet (wifi) with a webcam inbuilt.
The cost of a decent specification Netbook with 2 gigabytes of memory, 250 gigabyte hard disk, external DVD rewriter for recovery disks, long-life battery to last a complete school day plus a spare battery pack is about 500.
Armed with a Netbook computer and some writing paper (written skills must always be maintained) is all a child would need for school. Course work could be downloaded from the Education department's central file server.
Wireless routers would give access to the internet at each school. Video presentations for each subject could be produced by best of breed teachers and watched by the child as many times as they needed to. Online tests could confirm the child's knowledge and save the classroom teacher hours of tedious marking. Analysis of the most common questions answered incorrectly could be fed back to the Education department to improve the course work available to download. If the Education department were to put out a competitive tender for a Netbook for every schoolchild in Spain (there must be a common make and model), the cost of each unit, with five year warranty, would be around 250 or even less. So, assuming a five year life of the Netbook, the cost to each parent would be 50 per year instead of 500 for books. Every Spanish child would be fully computer literate when they left school, giving them every chance of obtaining a higher paid job.
The above idea would not be popular with those making millions out of the current Heath Robinson system of deliberately changing the course work each year to ensure books cannot be passed down to others. A trial on a small scale would be needed to test-out the idea - ironing out any niggles or problems which would be inevitable initially. Majorca could be the ideal location and pioneer the high-tech future of Spanish schooling!
Mark Masters
Andratx
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