Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
That would be another factor.
You could get more bang for the buck by taking half what this would cost and using it to help schools get paper textbooks. It's all half of the schools I know of can do to get the funding to get regular books and supplies, and pay the teachers a decent salary, let alone contemplate any sort of high tech initiative.
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Dennis
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Again you missed the whole point in my OP...it would cost schools NOTHING. Students would be required to buy the devices...at whatever cost works...my $100 was just a number. As I indicated parents or the kids themselves throw away $1000's/year on cars, cell phones, video games...and they as a rule spend a few bucks for some pens, pencils and a bit of paper...it's a matter of priority over instant gratification.
Schools can restore courses they had to eliminate because the books needed were costing $10/each or so...and for a lit course they might easily go through 5-10 books a semester per student depending on the reading level and the depth of in class discussions. That is easily $75/kid...and a book might last all of 3-years as they are paperbacks. Again this way the books are FREE and the kids provide the reader...or even there could be a deposit setup where the school loans them out...
But the idea is to find ways to return real learning not look to keep avoiding it...
Of course I am certain Amazon would not have the production capacity right now nor the support structure to begin something like this tomorrow...but it would be nice to see a school district somewhere consider the idea.
One of the BEST courses I took in HS was taught by a guy named Mr. Sciame (I think I spelled it correctly.) First quarter was Minority Lit and the second was Shakespeare...never did I enjoy learning as much as I did in those course and I really developed a love of reading beyond SciFi...I also learned there was more to reading then simply looking at the words. There was meaning and depth in great writing. One simply had to know to look for it...btw, my degrees are not in liberal arts at all but I took what I learned from these courses with me into the arena of problem solving and analysis.
By removing this from school curriculums we do a huge disservice to the kids of today and tomorrow...and we now have the means to return it at essentially no cost as almost all the classics are public domain and ready as ebooks.
And heck if a kid has a laptop and knows how to use it then let them use that instead...but I know I would prefer the dedicated reader instead.