There’s been a lot of talk recently in Kosovo about school textbooks, and I thought I’d interrupt my banking focused posting with an idea of mine that can hopefully be picked up by someone. Since AI has been drastically and exponentially changing every sphere of our lives, I expect the education sector is going to be completely different in a few years as well. So, whatever I’m saying here will not be relevant in a decade. However, until then, I think governments that mandate the use of textbooks in schools, should change the process on how information is provided to students. This post is very short, since the idea is very simple. It’s not about reinventing the wheel, just using something that is already established, to achieve a more efficient outcome. How? Naturally, using technology and open source. Just to clarify, this mainly applies to primary and secondary education.
The classical way of learning, for centuries, has been: you go to school, teacher says “you need to buy book X”, you buy said book, go to school each day, and you follow the pages of the book while the teacher explains what the book says. In the end, the teacher (or school) tests you on whether or not you have understood what the book said. Very simple. What’s the problem?
Well, the problem has always been the capitalist nature of our societies, where the profit incentive has somewhat perverted the way that textbooks are produced and provided to students. Since ‘someone’ has to write and produce the books, that someone is usually a business, and by design, their incentive is to maximise profit. How is that done? By trying to maximise the number of books sold.
That motive in odds with the nature of the information that must be contained within those books. Mathematics never changes. Neither does biology. An alphabet never changes. Then why do we need new editions of books teaching those subjects? For two reasons that are related to one another: one is intellectual property, and the other is profit. Usually, the company that creates the textbooks retains the intellectual property of the book, and only that company can profit from the production of that book. They print textbooks, students buy them, they profit, everyone’s happy. But the problem is that books don’t die. They can survive for many decades. If you produce enough of them, then they will be passed on from generation to generation, and that means production and sales slow down. So, how do we get back to the profits that they were used to in the beginning? Just slightly change the content of the book, and say that it is updated and better. Instruct students to buy the new edition; as if the multiplication table has changed, or as if the mitochondria is not the powerhouse of the cell anymore. Profit continues.
The solution to this problem is to remove the profit incentive from the creation of textbook. Just the drafting of it, not producing it. They can continue to make money printing the textbook.
Usually, school textbooks are approved by a government agency, whether or not they can be used to teach a certain subject. This is our collective way of trying to ensure that we pass down adequate and correct information to our children. Then, if they’re ‘approving’ textbooks, it is not a major stretch if they also owned the intellectual property. Then, if you take another half a step, you can easily say that, if they’re a government/public agency, and they own the intellectual property, then why not just openly publish it online?
Education systems in all countries can establish a baseline of what students are expected to know in each subject and each grade, and then create the textbook for it and publish it openly online. Schools would be prevented from mandating anything additional than that baseline textbook, and students will then freely download it and use it in school. They can print it themselves or they can buy it from someone that made a better job of printing it. Companies that used to compete by continuously creating textbooks can try and profit from producing the baseline textbooks (by using economies of scale), or they can create accompanying materials (I.e. “Grade 7 Maths for Dummies”, or “Grade 8 Chemistry with experiments that you can do at home”). They will then compete on either increasing the efficiency in textbook production, or by providing better information to students.
Those government agencies that publish the books online can then create a process where those books are updated by its citizens, making the drafting process more directly democratic. Put them up on Github (or a similar platform), where people are free to make proposals for changes. Those changes then would be either accepted or not accepted by education experts, thus creating a natural evolution of textbooks that students use.
Two ways of actually executing this: governments can either purchase the intellectual property of existing textbooks and then publish them online, or they can create new (or adapt existing) books. Obviously the first way is quicker, but it may be more expensive. In terms of publishing them online, the infrastructure is already there, since governments regularly publish things online, and citizens download them. Also, many government agencies actually have Github pages (see the list here) where they publish their open source code. So, execution effort required is close to zero.
Mind you, this is not a novel idea! Open textbooks have been a thing for a few years now. The problem is, that all those initiatives are private and there is a severe lack of centralised collective effort. Openstax (a Rice University project) is an excellent example; a great user interface, a great collection of books, you can download, read online, everything’s there. This needs to be replicated on a government level.
If you’re someone in a Government agency responsible for this stuff and reading this blog post, please consider open sourcing textbooks for students. It will make everyone’s life easier. At the very least, it will be used to train AI models and make them better for our grandchildren.
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