Should BCCHS Students Continue To Receive Physical Textbooks?

Anthony Acevedo, Photography Editor

With the ever-growing use of the internet and various media including school textbooks being scanned into online ebooks, it begs the question: should schools still give out textbooks?

This is a topic that hasn’t been thoroughly explored, at least to my knowledge it hasn’t, but I’m writing about it now so that this topic can be brought up by the student body at large. In my opinion, textbooks should still be given out to students.

I believe this because, being a student myself and in class when most of this occurs, students tend not to have a charged laptop most of the time. Giving textbooks out to students for the classes that use the textbook material for most of the lessons would prevent the mishap of  “Teacher I didn’t charge my laptop last night can I borrow one?” Though from my experience, this happens every other week.

a desk with a note book and laptop
A desk with a notebook and laptop

I decided to get the opinion of a fellow student and this is what they had to say.  Micheal Guerrero (12) was asked whether he had a preference in using an electronic or physical textbook. Guerrero responded by saying that he preferred using electronic textbooks.

When asked about how many textbooks he had received throughout high school, he responded with “less than ten.” I then asked him, “Why do you think textbooks are still used in today’s environment?” He explained, “Some people feel better reading physically and like annotating.”

When asked why he thinks the school hasn’t made the switch to electronic textbooks, he said, “I feel like they don’t want to throw away books, so they reuse them.” He then added that the type of textbook he finds easier to access would be digital, because he could look at it wherever, whenever. They are better because less paper is wasted and students carry less.”

This is economically a good thing and the schools would need to find a new purpose for lockers or get rid of them. On the other hand, I don’t see that happening in the near future.