Turkey kills school books, moves to tablet in all schools

We even lack the tech to run governmental sites in a stable and secure way. Forget about making this kind of technological movement worthy for the kids.

These will be highly restricted tablets - even not working outside of classrooms -, and with highly censored Internet. We have a tendency to restrict any sites against Islamic creationism so most of any pro-evolution or even scientific evolution ones will be restricted. I believe they will put the kids on a "white-listed" restriction zone.

Other than these points, we lack a decent educational system. Every government has been trying to circumvent the system according to their views and change curriculum, exam and admission ways annually. And there are too many children lacking the basic thinking and reading abilities. So these tablets won't make any good to them.

-- loosely related political point of view start --

Even governments have been circumventing how long and "how" the education system is. This year AKP legislated an education system of 4+4+4 which means, well I have no fucking idea! But as much as I've heard it would make possible 4 year old kids to be admitted for elementary school which will have "optional" Quran and "Prophet Muhammad" lessons and women to be continue education without attending the last 4 years.

-- loosely related political point of view end --

In the light of these information, I again don't believe this bold move means anything for the children. It's just a pr and social engineering move.

Changing from paper to electronic still images is kinda "meh".

On the topic, In my point of view, these moves are just wasting government funding, even a corruption possibility. If you know about Deniz Feneri Lawsuit you can understand my doubts.

Without deep understanding of the upcoming results and project targets, these projects are only time and resource wasting. Also giving false hopes to parents about our education systems quality.

In terms of temporal motivation theory, the utility of messing around is much higher than the utility of boring study. Two ways to fix this—either lower the utility of messing around, or raise the utility of actual learning.

A punishment by teacher (with high enough expectancy) for messing around with classmates or cellphone does the first. Obviously, a book is too boring—but replace it with an iPad and children can now play games while no one notices[0], which makes the utility of messing around go up again.

Another, arguably better way would be raising the utility of actual learning relative to messing around with stuff. In other words, make so that children would like to do it themselves—through some psychological reward (valuable and close enough temporarily), or by making it an enjoyable process (i.e., immediate reward). It means fixing the system though.

[0] Like many of us, in regular day job environments, can (and do) procrastinate with the help of our fancy devices.