« Je ne voudrai pas être négatif sur Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mais il n’avait pas fait voter de réforme économique durant ses 100 premiers jours. Nous, nous avons fait voter le plus gros plan de relance de l’histoire de ce pays. Nous avons changé l’approche de la guerre en Irak. Et nous sommes sur le point de ratifier un budget qui permettra des changements majeurs. »

Reading a book composed entirely of excerpts from textbooks may seem an unpromising activity, but history texts reveal much about national perspectives and prejudices: They are more expressive than government pronouncements; they get into matters diplomats avoid; and yet, as the authors note, they are in varying degrees state-sanctioned and thus official, or semi-official, stories about the national past. Most reflect public attitudes; all help to create those attitudes because they are the most widely read histories in each country, and because kids read them during the formative adolescent years. What students remember from their reading is not, of course, so clear. (It’s certainly not clear in the United States, where history texts run to 1,200 pages and weigh about four pounds.) Still the texts have an authority that books by individual historians lack, for, even in the best school systems, teachers, in their desperate attempt to drum in a few names and dates, rarely question their points of view, and students hazily come to regard what they read as the truth.

Au final, concluent les auteurs, les tables numériques peuvent apporter une expérience plus immersive et dynamique que le papier. Le dessin favorise le processus cognitif et permet de mieux comprendre et assimiler un concept abstrait. Le support numérique permet la répétition et l’autoexpérimentation que le papier ne permet pas. Reste qu’en comparant les résultats des étudiants à leur examen, la différence entre les modes d’apprentissages liés aux deux supports ne se fait pas sentir.