Paper and Ink: Physical Books Prove Their Worth During the Pandemic

The trend toward various forms of online education, which had been growing for more than a decade, accelerated massively during the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, which shut down most American brick-and-mortar schools in March 2019. Students from kindergarten to postgraduate found themselves doing, or trying to do, nearly everything online.

The strengths and weaknesses of online learning have been listed and analyzed numerous times. Journalists and educators have discussed the various versions of distance learning, and the associated advantages and disadvantages, at great length.

It is clear that staring daily for many hours at the screen of one’s laptop — or iPad or iPhone or Android or tablet or desktop, etc. — is not healthy, mentally or physically.

Physicians have catalogued the problems created by an overexposure to the blue light which screens emit. Psychologists have long known about the numerous problems which result from too little time spent outdoors and away from anything electronic.

One helpful factor in this situation is the simple book. Students who must spend hours on their devices will benefit mentally and physically from turning off the electronics and reading a book. The same text — whether it’s a newspaper article, a poem, or an explanation of chemical reactions — is processed differently by the human brain, depending on whether it’s read on a screen or read from a physical book.

Retention, focus, and comprehension are better with physical ink-and-paper documents.

Some over-eager proponents of online education had envisioned a world in which a single tablet device — think Nook or Kindle — contained dozens of books, and a student would spend hours reading from this single source.

That was precisely the wrong prescription.

For those students who, during the pandemic, had access to physical books — math books, history, literature, etc. — learning became richer, because it was not confined to the screens of their laptops.

Nobody really wants to read all of MacBeth or Hamlet on a smartphone. Students can study more effectively from several pages of algebraic equations or chemical diagrams on paper than from arduously scrolling up and down endless webpages.

Moving forward, schools can work to ensure that physical books are available to supplement what’s done online.

Online learning will not go away anytime soon, and it certainly has some benefits. But the very best type of distance learning will be that type which offers physical books, in addition all that’s online, to the students.

Online: The Human Factor in Education

Despite the ceaseless drive toward “remote learning” or “distance learning,” the drawbacks of online education remain stubbornly obvious. Authentic human presence and human interaction prove to be factors which improve the quality of learning and intellectual development.

To be sure, there are some specific instances in which online learning is effective: primarily when there is a highly motivated student who has excellent self-discipline, work habits, organizational skills, and study routines; and when the curriculum and content have relatively little ambiguity and little conceptual complexity.

But whether at the secondary or at the post-secondary level, such examples remain rare. For this reason, observation reveals the desirability of in-person instruction. At the University of Michigan, Professor Steven Clark reports that

We can record our lectures, but what we know from past years is that students who don’t come to class but watch the lecture at home struggle to master the material.

Online learning, in those instances in which it is most effective, places an extra burden upon, and requires more effort from, the student, in order to achieve equal or lesser amounts of learning. In addition to being less effective, online learning is less efficient.