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"Heavy backpacks will soon become a thing of the past in South Korea with the digitization of all textbooks in state schools by 2015. "

" These days, college students are burdened by higher costs than ever before. Tuition is at an all-time high and continues to skyrocket, making it more and more difficult to get a diploma without incurring serious debt. The incredibly unaffordable cost of textbooks just adds insult to injury. With textbook publishers holding a virtual monopoly in the market, students often have little choice in the matter. Luckily, a new paradigm is beginning to emerge: open textbooks. Giving the students the option of print or free digital copies, costs drop precipitously. The only problem: textbook companies don't want them on the market."

"Like a band of summer vacation-crazed high school students, South Korea is tossing their textbooks into the great bonfire of "No More Pencils, No More Books…!" No, they're not entering an indefinite period of state-organized hooky, they are doing away with those burdensome textbooks and digitizing their entire curriculum. In an effort to enable education through technology while bringing down costs, all materials are expected to be digitized by 2015. When the effort is complete, students will be able to learn when and where they want."

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- For incoming freshmen at western Connecticut's suburban Brookfield High School, hefting a backpack weighed down with textbooks is about to give way to tapping out notes and flipping electronic pages on a glossy iPad tablet computer.

"iPads are making waves in education all over the nation, even in college classrooms, where they're replacing laptops, textbooks, and notebooks. Some colleges have even gone so far as to hand out iPads to new students, helping students and faculty all work with the same technology for learning."

But a lecture is a lecture. The teaching limitations of delivered information are inherent and familiar to all experienced teachers who pay attention. Flipping classrooms will hardly make a dent in education's most intractable problems. The idea doesn't even come close to meriting the over-the-top head that Time's editors gave the article: "Reboot the School." Intractable educational problems will begin to disappear when learners' rear ends are gotten off school furniture and allowed out where life is being lived, when learners' eyes are lifted from reference works passed off as textbooks and directed to the real world, when learners' minds are respected too much to treat them as mere storage units for secondhand, bureaucratically selected information. Intractable problems in education will begin to disappear when kids are not just allowed to chart their own course, but are encouraged to do so, and given means to that end. Too bad there are no policymakers willing to promote that idea, and no rich philanthropists willing to put up encouragement money.