Petition with more than two thousand signatures calls for the return of paper manuals | Education

More than two thousand people signed a petition calling for the end of the pilot project of digital textbooks in schools, pointing out delays in learning and risks of access to inappropriate content, such as pornography or violence.

The Ministry of Education decided to carry out a project to replace paper textbooks with digital books, which began gradually in 2020/2021. The program is voluntary and has more and more educational establishments: this year it involves 23,159 students from the 3rd to the 12th years in around 160 schools across the country, according to data provided to Lusa by the guardianship.

However, there are parents and teachers who are against the project and are calling for its suspension. Three months ago, Catarina Prado e Castro launched a petition “Against excessive digitalization in teaching and the massification of digital school textbooks: Public Petition (peticaopublica.com)”, which now has 2,219 signatures.

The petition argues that paper books are “healthier and more effective resources for all children” and therefore calls for the “immediate end of the pilot project” of digital manuals, remembering that children and adolescents already spend excessive time in in front of screens, with negative consequences for your health.

“Experts from the most varied areas, from neuroscience, to ophthalmology, psychologists or teachers, have warned about the exposure and excessive use of screens, but the school decided to increase it, without asking parents or teachers”, criticized Catarina Prado and Castro, in statements to Lusa.

“Learning through a screen harms learning, because it reduces the ability to read, pay attention and remember.” Furthermore, he added, the computers where children have books to study are the same “where the games and social networks are”.

The mother of two boys says that she has noticed that sometimes her children are studying on the computer, but they also have games open or are watching videos.

Catarina Prado e Castro also said she was concerned about unsupervised online browsing, saying that at her children’s school there had been students caught watching pornography or other inappropriate websites on their cell phones.

The mother warns that “the risks in computers are precisely the same if they do not have filters, which is not always guaranteed when computers are delivered and is not even taught to parents”.

Furthermore, with this pilot project, access to the Internet “is no longer an option for parents and becomes mandatory for children from the age of 7 or 8”, highlighted the mother who defends controlled access to the Internet.

“I don’t want my children to spend too much time looking at screens and instead of studying they are reading multitasking involving school and recreational tasks simultaneously. Children use screens for purely recreational purposes and do not have the ability to self-regulate when they must study using a device that offers countless possibilities for distraction,” he told Lusa.

The author of the petition revealed that the petition will be delivered at the beginning of next month to the Assembly of the Republic.

More than 80% of parents covered by a survey being carried out by the “Movimento Menos Ecrãs, Mais Vida” want the pilot project to be suspended. “We have answered more than 200 surveys, involving more than nine groups of schools in Coimbra, Lisbon, Ponte de Lima, Almada, Paço de Arcos, Ponta Delgada and even Madeira. Although the data is still preliminary, we have more than 80% of dissatisfied parents, who want the project to end”, guarantees Catarina Prado e Castro.