Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, wants the state’s schoolchildren to ditch their textbooks and read the source material for their homework online instead - not to make it easier for lazy students to paste slabs of text straight from books into their essays, but because California can no longer afford them.
In a plot more improbable even than the storyline of his movies, Mr Schwarzenegger has led what would be the world’s eighth-biggest economy, were California a separate country, to the brink of bankruptcy. Ditching textbooks is part of a plan to clip $1.35 billion from the state’s annual $9 billion bill for goods and services, and so shrink California’s $24.3 billion budget deficit.
Though fiscal necessity played midwife to his innovation, Mr Schawarzegger may have stumbled on an educational breakthrough, albeit by an accidental route. The day of the printed book may, anyway, be waning. State officials say that a textbook costs $75 to $100. Digital equivalents (California is already evaluating free online texts for maths and science) are not only cheaper, they more closely echo how children trawl for information. Digital textbooks are more easily updated. And you can, say, read about a science experiment and then watch a video demonstration.
Mr Schwarzenegger argues that frequently updated digital textbooks will make California’s students smarter and boost their chances of success in life. Alternatively they could do it the old-fashioned way, as outlined by Mr Schwarzenegger on The Tonight Show a fortnight ago. He joked to Jay Leno that, when advising some California university students on how to get on, “I told them to work like hell and marry a Kennedy”.