A group of civil society organisations led by Africa Education Watch (AEW) has called on the government of Ghana to cancel its plans to replace textbooks with laptops in public senior high schools.

Development Diaries reports that the Executive Director of AEW, Kofi Asare, who also spoke on behalf of Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition and the Civil Society SDG Platform, said laptops are meant to complement textbooks and not to replace them.

The country’s Vice President, Mahamudu Bawumia, had said that textbooks and other teaching and learning materials would be installed on laptops to be used during lessons.

‘If this country must move forward in the right direction, we must invest in education which is the only platform for preparing nation builders for tomorrow’, the vice president said at an event in the Volta Region.

‘The Minister for Education has also assured me that this year, we will start the replacement of textbooks with laptops that have textbooks embedded in senior high schools’.

It is understood that the programme is meant to give senior high school teachers modern materials to facilitate teaching and learning.

However, Asare said the idea of replacing textbooks with laptops is unrealistic and has never been done anywhere else in the world.

‘We believe that textbooks can never be replaced with e-textbooks. A laptop can never take the place of a printed textbook. It has never been so in any country and it will never work in Ghana’, Modern Ghana quoted Asare as saying.

‘If government has any plans to introduce laptops it should be within a different context at a different time where it probably will be a complement to printed textbooks. But textbooks on laptops, that is e-textbooks, can never replace printed textbooks’.

He called on the Ghanian Parliament to reject the idea in case it is presented before lawmakers for consideration.

Photo source: EIFL