Has Arnold Thought Through This Digital Initiative?
 Monday, June 15th, 2009  by Connie T.

Has Arnold Schwarzenegger gone back to hitting the peace pipe? What is he thinking? If you haven't heard, the Arnold has revealed a plan to get rid of regular textbooks in school. The plan is called California's Digital Textbook Initiative, designed to assist the budget woes in CA, and would swap out those hardcover schoolbooks for online learning material.

Kids, as you all know, today are very familiar with listening to their music digitally and online and to watch TV online, to watch movies online, to be on Twitter and participate in that and on Facebook and all those kinds of things. So basically kids are feeling so comfortable today, as a matter of fact, as comfortable with their cell phones and their keyboards as I did when I was your age, when I was a kid, with my pencils and crayons.

So this is why I think it is so important that we move on from the textbooks.

The textbooks are outdated, as far as I'm concerned.

We do give him credit for trying to think creatively to deal with California's crippling deficit (at least $24 billion that's supposed to be balanced by today in order to obtain annual Wall Street loans, on top of the $42 billion addressed in February). And he's not a bad guy, whether or not you agree with him politically...he doesn't even accept his governor's salary ($175k), sending it instead to charities.

But this initiative is sending librarians and teachers into a tizzy. Think about it this way: no matter how electronically inclined you are, would you prefer to pick up a book to read, or get the eBook version? And besides that, won't all parents will all have to make sure there are enough computers at home for all of their children to read and study? Is the digital information going to remain available for years for these students to refer back to if needed, throughout high school and college?

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