ANP
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 03:56
Every year, a mountain of textbooks ends up in the trash, to the chagrin of many parents and teachers. Outgoing Minister of Education Dijkgraaf therefore wants to investigate whether the system of textbooks in the Netherlands can be made more sustainable and cheaper. He writes this to the House of Representatives, reports Trouw.
In recent years, the three main textbook publishers have moved to a model where schools must purchase new books for every student each year. The idea behind this is that schools no longer have to collect books at the end of the school year and can negotiate directly with publishers without the intervention of a distributor. Licensed schools get access to online learning materials and receive a new learning workbook every year.
Waste of paper
But according to interest groups of parents and teachers, the system also has a major disadvantage: it leads to paper wastage. “It is about public money and this waste of paper is not good”, a spokesperson for education union AOb told Trouw.
According to Dijkgraaf, the new system is also more expensive for schools. This would mean that teachers are less likely to be able to choose the learning materials they want, because the money has run out. The 300 euros that school boards receive annually from the government per student is often not enough because a license for one subject sometimes costs tens of euros.
The publishers Noordhoff, ThiemeMeulenhoff and Malmberg object that the new books are more environmentally friendly to produce than the old ones. The abandonment of the workbooks that can only be used once has also resulted in savings, according to them.
2023-08-19 01:56:45
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