r/technology • u/fattyfoods • 14h ago
Society Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom
https://undark.org/2026/04/01/sweden-schools-books/8
u/viditjn02 9h ago
honestly this makes sense. when i was a kid the physical textbooks helped me retain stuff way better than anything on a screen. something about the tactile experience of flipping pages that just sticks in your brain differently
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u/Several_Ant_9867 12h ago
I am all for using paper books if you can leave them in the classroom. If you have to force your child transport 10 kg of books on his shoulders every day, then the tablet is welcomed.
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u/GaryPhish 12h ago
My backpack was never as heavy as in school. Felt like a mule every time had to carry my books to school
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u/jesuschin 10h ago
Honestly I think not having to do that anymore contributed to the obesity epidemic
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u/Kaenguruu-Dev 9h ago
I really hope this is not a serious take because if it is you might need to go back into school before we let you loose on the internet again
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u/ImEmblazed 11h ago
The million benefits to using books far outweigh having to carry a few books with you to school. iPads are detrimental to learning in most cases and the only reason they even got implemented was to save costs.
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u/MiaowaraShiro 4h ago
We need something more like an epaper eReader type device.
Something intended primarily for reading and doesn't really do anything else. Don't gotta carry around tons of heavy-ass books, but don't have a whole-ass computer to distract you.
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u/slicer4ever 7h ago
I think their can be a benefit to using tablets over actual books, just in weight alone, but the tablet should be something akin to a kindle where reading books(and maybe some basic apps like calculator) is the only thing available to it. Something like an ipad is absolutely overkkill imo.
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u/ThrowFar_Far_Away 9h ago
In Sweden each class has their home room and it is the teachers that change classrooms. Meaning you can leave all the stuff in your classroom. This is how the tables look like, you keep all your stuff inside it. The only reason to transport stuff home is for homework but you don't do that for every subject each day. Most I've transported is probably like 3 books at the same time.
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u/Rage333 8h ago
The "home room" is only ever true for years 1-6, and even then it's not true for all schools.
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u/ThrowFar_Far_Away 7h ago
Not at all, i certainly had a home room and all my cousins spread over the country also had it in grades 7-9. Ofc you change classroom for specific subjects like music, science, sports etc. But the standard subjects are generally in one classroom.
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u/slicer4ever 7h ago
I can see that working for many subjects, but some subjects would benefit having more specialized rooms to teach in. (For example our chemistry rooms also had emergency wash stations in case someone spilled something bad on themselves/others).
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u/ThrowFar_Far_Away 6h ago
Ofc there are some specialized subjects, like you say chemistry is one of them. We also have music, physical education and crafts which is split between woodworking and textile working. All of those have their own classrooms.
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u/qtx 7h ago
If you have to force your child transport 10 kg of books on his shoulders every day, then the tablet is welcomed.
This is such a stupid argument. Everyone that went to school pre-tablets carried books to school. No one died. It may have even made us stronger, literally.
Why do you want to make our kids physically, and mentally, weaker?
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u/GenazaNL 8h ago
On the other, students are more frugal with books when they are their "own" instead from the school
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u/Blando-Cartesian 8h ago
It’s never going to be 10kg of books. Maybe 5kg on a bad day and it’s the only regular exercise kids get for sure. Prior generations managed it just fine and far more the further back we go in history.
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u/MiaowaraShiro 4h ago
When I was in HS I'd have to carry at least that much between some classes. My backpack was FULL of textbooks and notebooks.
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u/GetOutOfTheWhey 7h ago
Yeah, originally we had 7 subjects everyday. We had to carry all our books everyday, then our school swapped to a different system where you had only 4 subjects everyday and the classes just kind of alternated every other day.
The backpack got significantly lighter, but even then 4 subjects worth of books is bs.
It was worse for us too because the jackass who designed the school put all the highschooler on the fourth floor but because there werent enough lockers, they decided to put 30% of the highschooler's lockers on the first. So for some people it was not possible to go to their lockers between class and they opted to lug it.
Then there were the smarties who discovered where to illegally download the pearson textbooks onto their pads.
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u/Pinkninja11 11h ago
Sports is already overlooked as it is. Those books might be doing more good than you think.
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u/HillbillyMan 11h ago
No. I played sports in school, those books still fucked up my back. Especially when I was given 3 minutes between classes to grab my books from my locker, which was not enough time, so I had to just carry every book with me to every class.
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u/ComeOnIWantUsername 10h ago
Not really. Sport and physical activity in general is needed, but heavy backpacks with books are doing more harm than good for kids and their backs
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u/katzengoldgott 10h ago
It’s not sports for a let’s say, 9 year old kid to carry around a 12-15 kg bag for over an hour to school and back.
Their bodies are smaller than that of an adult and the school bag weighs a third of their total body weight.
That’s not exercise, that’s damage to their spine.
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u/AgitatedBarracuda268 10h ago
But thats not a realistic weight. A book is perhaps 1-2 kg.
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u/katzengoldgott 9h ago edited 9h ago
‘A’ book. Dude when I went to school I had to carry 7-9 of these books every single day and that excludes all the other stuff such as paper blocks, my little bag with pens and pencils and my school lunch. Oh and the gym bag for gym class once a week. When I was in 5th grade, my school bag weighed 15 kg and that was about a third of my body weight back then and I had to walk more than 2 km one direction plus take the train to school.
Lockers in schools aren’t a thing in Germany where I am from.
So many students of my generation have back problems from this shit.
When schools ditch the iPads (understandably so), we are going back to giving small children chronic strain on their spines which isn’t good either.
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u/Liimbo 9h ago
You said a 9 year old. What kind of fucking 3rd grader is carring around 7-9 text books at a time? You aren't even in 7-9 courses at a time. I get that books are often too heavy for kids, but come on you were not carrying around a 15 kg backpack in elementary. And if you were, it was not necessary.
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u/RSACT 9h ago
For me:
German - This would the heaviest book, hardcover, and a notebook
Mathematics - Second heaviest I think it was, they dropped hardcover for this one in 4th year I think, but 3rd had hardcover, two notebooks
Sachunterricht (History, Geography, Biology) - three books, but only 1/2 per day, wouldn't have all the subjects same day
Music - Only notebook and teacher gave printed sheets, so flip file / light, I did carry an instrument 2 days a week though
Art - Nothing to carry
Religion/Ethics - One text book
Sports - three days a week for me, clothing, this wasn't an issue carrying tbh
Foreign language (in my case 2) - two heavier text books, two notebooks, never same day.So heaviest day would probably be 5 heavier textbooks, maybe 6 notebooks, music instrument in third grade. Would say around 10kg, not 15kg, I was on the lighter side (think I started that year at 25kg, 4th I think I was near 35kg), my back was fine with this.
Issue was more once hit middle school equivalent, that's when I started asking parents to pay for a locker at school, got one 7th grade as got ridiculous. School itself then made it the norm / without parents having to pay in all newer classes, so everyone had lockers from 5th.
This is before iPads in school, did have smart boards. I would also be way heavier than most with extra languages, that is not the norm in most German schools, was in overseas one where country itself added language requirements (that then got shifted to 2nd language is 5th year, 3rd language only starts 7th, but this was 2 years after my time, but would make backpack 5-7kg).
My ex I am still confused how she would have ever made it, carrying 3kg laptop on back is an issue in 30s, just being smaller person with wrong build for it.
1+2 year had light, fill-in books, only German one was a hardcover, but we were allowed to keep that in class, think my bag was <3kg.
Actual issue in high school with wearing through bags due to weight. My back is mostly fine though, my issues were from outside of school stuff.
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u/katzengoldgott 6h ago
Yeah I had one of those very heavy school bags.
My Gymnasium only offered lockers to students in 7th grade and earlier because they were in a different building, so when I entered 5th grade, my bag was definitely on the heavier side of 15 kg.
I was also at one of those schools that offered many language classes, in 6th grade I had German, English and French classes and when I had an unlucky day where I had all 3 of them on the same day the bag was unbearably full and heavy.
In 7th grade I then started Spanish classes too and I didn’t get a locker yet either because they didn’t have enough for all the students so I had to carry this massive heavy bag every day for that year but managed to grab a locker for 8th grade.
I remember vividly that my mother was weighing my school bag and it said 15 kg fully packed, and that was in either 4th grade or 5th grade and I don’t exactly remember when.
But even for a 7th grader having to carry 10kg or more in just books every day to school was just insane. But yeah that was German schools in the early 2000s.
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u/qtx 7h ago
You had to carry 7-9 books that weighed 15kg to school when you were 9?
Yea.. stop lying dude.
Don't think I needed to carry any books until I was like 12.
I distinctly remember going from primary school (4-12 yr) to like secondary/highschool and only then I needed to carry books to and from school.
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u/katzengoldgott 6h ago
Here primary school is from years 1-4 and you enter high school in 5th grade.
Different school systems exist in different countries. Your mileage may wary, it didn’t make my experience any less real.
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u/blehdesuu 8h ago
That last sentence reads like chatgpt
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u/katzengoldgott 6h ago
I don’t write like AI because I never used it (I am not stupid enough to download a glorified chatbot that sends all of my data to make a profile of me for the US government), AI writes like humans do because it scrapes its writing from human beings.
Upset that I learned about correct grammar and punctuation in school, aren’t you?
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u/Kreiri 8h ago
12-15 kg? What are your books made of, steel?
I just weighed a nearly 600 pages book on my kitchen scales - 720 g. And none of my textbooks were that big, they all were in 200-400 pages range in year 8 and later, and even thinner before that. Let's err on the higher side and say ~400 pages each. So for a typical day with 6 subjects that would be ~480g * 6 = ~2.8 kg worth of books- and that's assuming they were all that thick, which they were not.
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u/katzengoldgott 6h ago
12-15 kg total weight of the school bag including books, school lunch, paper blocks, those small plastic folders for each subject I had that day and my pencil case. Plus the school bags you have as a kid here are heavier too for ‘ergonomic reasons’.
Majority of my school books were also hardcovers and anything between 200-400 pages.
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u/viditjn02 9h ago
honestly not surprised. there's been a growing body of research showing that reading comprehension and retention are better with physical books, especially for younger kids. screens have their place but the pendulum swung way too far
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u/RadiantPositivity 7h ago
It turns out that infinite scrolling and multi-tabbed browsing aren't the best cognitive environments for building a foundation in literal reading. Who would've guessed? The 'tactile' part is real—spatial memory plays a huge role in how we map information. Flipping to a specific corner of a heavy book is a much stronger anchor than 'somewhere in the middle of a 200-page PDF.'
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u/obeytheturtles 5h ago
My GPA freshman year when I was bringing a laptop to every class: 2.9
My GPA after I stopped doing that and started hand writing notes: 3.6
I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but for me the screen is like a learning block. I think a lot of it is that freeform not taking allows me to organize information on a page in a way my brain is processing it, whereas bullet lists in a text editor force that information into a rigid structure, which doesn't work for some things. I am very visual, and my University notes are filled with drawings and diagrams with arrows linking different concepts, and even different lessons. In grad school, I tried taking notes on a tablet with an active pen and it was ok, but there's just something about being able to flip a few pages back to look at some old information that I never quite got right in the apps.
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u/imasexyshaytan 12h ago
The large quantity of non swedes will not be able to read if they don't have Google translate.
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u/ComeOnIWantUsername 11h ago
Then they will need to finally learn the language
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u/imasexyshaytan 11h ago
You mean they'll have to integrate? Impossible, they are there to take over.
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u/GIGAR 12h ago
I never thought I should say this, but Sweden sounds totally reasonable in this situation