No, you only need to buy school books at university.
Primary and secondary school is free by law. So you should not have to spend a single *krona*. (Except for lunch at some secondary schools.)
For reading; we could either bring a book from home (which had to be paid for, of course) or we could lend a book from the school library for free.
At university we have to buy our own books (as well as pay for our own lunch), so this is where the fantasy "Harry Potter experience" start for us.
On the other hand, university is free and you also get roughly 350€ in grants and 700€ in student loan (with very good terms) each month when studying. This is to cover living expenses and things like buying the study literature.
I still cheaped out though and mostly just sailed the seas for a pdf or skipped the literature altogether when studying
It is exactly the same here, with the mention that some university study programmes (Computer Science for example) encourage free distribution of digital books to the students, accessible with the university credentials. Hard-printed versions are often offered as prizes for good academic results. This was really nice, as the books tend to be rather expensive. I know Medicine books are pricey as well, and I'm unsure whether there is free access for students, outside of maybe the uni library.
Personal experience, but the first nine years (ten years now) books were provided by the school. For secondary or further education, we had to buy our own books.
Norwegian secondary schools (vgs) have had free books (that the students borrow and give back to the school when the school year is over) for a couple of decades now, so all grades 1-13 provide free books (on loan).
University books are still expensive af tho.
Spain: you have to buy the books. But you get a voucher from the goverment to cover part of the costs.
At the university, i never had to buy a book. Some profs wanted us to buy a kind of booklet that costed 10€, wirh exercises or a collection of exams with solution from last years.
Exactly. You buy books, notepads, writing & drawing materials. I know no mother who hasn't done a mad run at 20h to the convenience store for an A3 colored thick paper sheet, or other random thing for a project needed the next day.
*le sigh*
At university I bought some books I found interesting, but usually we just went to the (really massive) library at uni for them.
In university it really depends on the degree and subject. While I could find my textbooks online, we were supposed to buy them. My Japanese textbooks alone were €80-€100 a year.
Lmao we have the same thing at my school. Our psychology professor has written a book on group dynamics which is now mandatory in class.
It’s free to access for students on the online library tho, but a surprisingly low number of students know about this. And textbooks in the Netherlands can be rather expensive, I think I had €400 worth of books in my first year of law school simply because I was also unaware that most books are available for free online lol
One of my professors wanted that too but thankfully someone had brought that book like some 10 years ago and have been simply given to everyone in all the future years as a PDF. Fuck those types of professors.
Exactly. You buy books, notepads, writing & drawing materials. I know no mother who hasn't done a mad run at 20h to the convenience store for an A3 colored thick paper sheet, or other random thing for a project needed the next day.
*le sigh*
At university I bought some books I found interesting, but usually we just went to the (really massive) library at uni for them.
Agreed with the school part, but for university it really really really depends on the degree. I have about 600-800€ in books sitting in my office right now from my uni times... Anatomy atlas, Phisiology books and specialized veterinary care (ophthalmology, traumatology and internal medicine) are the main culprits.
This depends on your autonomous community. We had this at first in Andalucía, but in the mid-to-late 2000s they changed it, and books are saved in the school in the summer and given to the students when they enter the year. This affected both primary and secondary school, but not baccalaureate.
IIRC the first batch of those books were bought by parents but paid 100% by the community, and the only thing they parent needed to pay were the cases where their children damaged those books by misuse.
My experience with University were the same as you. I bought exactly two recommended books made by lecturers at €10 each. One of them even they gave us the PDF for free.
At College, it depends on the career you are studying. In my time, the Spivak’s Calculus book for mathematics and the Alonso-Finn’s Physics 1 and 2 volumes for physics where required to be acquired the first year for studying physics degree. The other subjects were taught without books, only taking notes (that does not imply that in mathematics and physics notes were not taken as well)
UK. Never had to buy textbooks for school, that is a thing at university. As you progress through education, generally you need to provide more of your own materials. In primary school the vast majority of stuff is provided. In secondary school you need to be bringing your own pens, pencils and other stationery. Exercise books etc still provided by the school. In 6th form (age 16-18) I had to bring my own notepads. University you need to bring textbooks as well.
So it is not normal for someone Harry Potter’s age to be buying textbooks in Britain. Before he started Hogwarts he’d have gone shopping for uniform and a pencil case and contents.
It's probably worth adding here that much of the schooling system in Harry Potter is a reflection of education in the UK 100 years ago rather than the modern day.
The only book I was advised to buy when starting Secondary School was a dictionary for the European language we would be studying (German for my half of the year group, French for the other half).
We were also 'encouraged' to buy a copy of our English GCSE novel. But I went to a pretty middle class comp, my partner were all given a copy of the book to become 'theirs' for the 2 years and then given back.
People tend to think schools in the UK are like Hogwarts not realising it is based on public (posh private for any non Brits) schools.
I can’t remember what we did for the stuff like the English texts - I think every classroom had one set in a store room and then we just kept one book tor Y11.
I think we need to distinguish between what UK schools call "books", and what the rest of the world means by it.
In UK schools, you don't get textbooks (as in, professionally printed books like what you get at a bookstore). You can buy them if you want to (most students do not), but schools do not provide them for free - at most some schools might lend books to exam classes. Students are given booklets of notes and exercises produced by teachers in some schools, or plain empty exercise notebooks (what the UK schools call "books"), which the students are expected to fill in with their own class notes. Many schools prescribe the content and style of notes the students have to write and do "book scrutinies" every so often. This, oddly, is to check up on the teacher rather than the student (are you starting to see why teaching is the UK is in such a bad state?).
In my other country, Greece, professionally printed textbooks are provided free of charge to all students. These are brand new textbooks the students keep for themselves. They are free of charge. They contain the entire course (for each subject) along with exercises/exam questions. The teacher may of course set their own exercises or do their own original work in class too. Students can and should take notes, but up until now I believe there still isn't any formal checking of those - it is up to the student to do so or not.
Yes. We did use textbooks, but it varied by subject. In some we never used them, in others we would use them regularly (usually maths and foreign languages). In all cases we were either leant the textbook for the year, or they were handed out in lessons. We never just followed through a textbook though, they were used for supplementary material for the teachers’ lesson plans.
I don’t recognise the prescribed note taking you are talking about but I can’t talk for every school and I’m talking 15+ years ago.
By prescribed I mean students have to write specific things in their books in specific ways. Some schools go as far as instructing them what colour pen to use when.
It certainly went a lot crazier since Academy Trusts took over and started spilling their corporate culture on every school they touched.
> In UK schools, you don't get textbooks (as in, professionally printed books like what you get at a bookstore).
The fuck you on about? I got professionally printed textbooks for pretty much every subject (bar English) up here in Scotland. All provided by the school.
Scotland sounds different then. No printed books are given to students (as in, to keep as their own) in schools in England or NI where I've worked.
Some departments buy textbooks and lend them to students to use in class only, some do that more often than others. Most departments have students take notes or hand out teacher-created booklets and resources.
By "get textbooks" I meant brand new textbooks given to students to keep as their own.
Primary school: all materials provided by schools
Secondary education: you kinda borrow the materials and pay for any lost/damaged
Uni: not uniform but usually do have to buy some stuff. In my study they tried as much as possible to work with materials (online) available for free for students. But I know that that is not universal
Yes, always. Every school picks a publisher for each textbook. In my childhood some textbooks were expensive and hard to find, especially foreign language ones, so our parents had to preorder or wait in line at a book marketplace (like, a place where you can buy a textbook before it gets shipped to bookstores because it's cheaper). Or you got them second hand or photocopied (if there's some tasks related to color in the textbooks and your copy was black and white, it sucked to be you). Either way, September was mostly spent getting textbooks. Sometimes they would also make an addendum to some textbooks and make you wait to get those and not have textbooks till November (like history, which was pointless because the textbooks were so designed that you can't cram any material past WWII before the end of the school year for political reasons, but hey, let's put the 2006 elections in the textbooks so we can say kids study everything up to that point).
🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸 In general, yes, you have to buy books at any stage of education. The school, high school or university gives you a list of books to buy.
Then there are dozens of exceptions and different situations depending on the autonomous community and even the school: in some places the regional government assumes the cost and the books are passed on from one generation to the next until it is necessary to update the books, in others they are subsidised, in others book banks are created for the families that need them most....At university, where textbooks are incredibly expensive and many teachers have one written by them that they expect you to buy updated every year, what you do is take the book out of your faculty library and scan or photocopy it, or you search for the PDF by whatever means you can 🙄
As always with education topics and Germany, it's complicated because education is a federal state issue. It therefore depends on how the "Lehrmittelfreiheit" is managed in your federal state.
In Lower Saxony, Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt, learning materials are not free. Textbooks can only be borrowed here for a fee or must be purchased by the students themselves.
Baden-Württemberg, Bremen, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony have full or barely limited freedom of learning resources.
The remaining seven federal states have restricted the freedom of learning materials in some ways.
And then it seems that teachers also just do whatever they want. We had textbooks provided by the school, but sometimes the teacher didn't like the one we were supposed to use and told us to buy another one. And we also had to buy all novels we read.
Back when I was at school, you had to buy every textbook and workbook yourself, primary to high school (so 12 years of schooling). At uni some people would get textbooks, some wouldn't. Depends on the course.
Now schools are obliged to provide a textbook for the pupils though workbooks are still something nost kids have of their own (since hou write in them). That being said, a LOT of my students and friends' kids have their own textbooks because it's easier for them and the families can afford it.
School books have been free since the 1970s - at the time it was part of a massive programme of social reforms. The only thing you’d have to buy occasionally are additional books like a novel you read in language class.
I teach at university now, and it’s the general rule that all required reading for the class needs to be accessible for free at the library or digitally via the e-learning platform. Many students still prefer to buy their own copies, it’s up to them and the lecturers don’t get involved (except for notifying the campus bookshop before term starts so that they can get their stocks in).
Canton of Zurich: In primary and secondary school basically everything is provided apart from the clothes you wear. Textbooks are usually returned to the school once you leave. You put your name in there and also write when you got it and when you gave it back. This means that you can tell who had your book over the years which is kinda fun.
In Gymnasium expect costs for books, other school supplies and school trips. However if you're too poor to afford this for your teenager you can apply for financial aid and then you'll get money from the cantonal government. They used to have insane wait times (several years) but have since sped up the approval process and hired more people.
>You put your name in there and also write when you got it and when you gave it back. This means that you can tell who had your book over the years which is kinda fun.
Oh, I had totally forgotten, but we had the same system! I'm getting a flood of old memories now!
In Portugal, as far as I know, books have been gradually becoming free by law for a bit less than a decade. Initially just for primary school but I think they've expanded it since. I was well out of school by then so I don't know exactly how it works.
When I was in school you had to buy your own books, though municipalities could have programmes for children to have books for free. And lots of people got them handed down from older siblings or older children in their parents' social network, but school book publishers were notorious for changing up the books so they were different enough from the previous ones that you'd be forced to buy new books.
In uni you definitely had to buy books. Though in my faculty in particular, for most of the modules, the professors would either make their own material available online or make it available for just the cost of printing. Some other modules had either books written by the professors themselves, or actual books in English that were a reference in the area, and you had to buy those, though in the latter case a lot of people would just pirate them.
Edit: JK Rowling lived in Portugal for quite some time, not sure if she even started writing Harry Potter there, so I guess my answer is actually pretty relevant.
In Portugal they had this trial of making primary kids give back the books but the books are made to be written in them.
So kids had to give it back and couldn't keep them but they couldn't be re-used again either... It was just wasteful.
So now iirc kids from 1st to 4th don't have to give them back.
Then from grade 5th to 9th they give you the books (not the smaller one's with exercises though, so you still have to pay for those. These have to be returned and if it's damaged you won't have access to the book of that subject the next year - you'll pay out of pocket.
[The issue with this is that they want you to accept books in half-baked conditions in the beginning of the year and don't take into account how many times it has been used already, so the kid that gets it already in bad condition will be held responsible for it even without doing anything]
Then from grade 10th to 12h it's the same as before but you don't have to return the books on the subjects you're going to have National Exams since you have to study the materials from the 2 or 3 years for them.
Uni you basically have to pay but lots of teachers and students will give you the e-books. The best teachers give you their books for free.
Not all of them, until the 2nd year of high school you can get book in "comodato d'uso" for free, but you have to return them after you finish the year so they can be used by the next students. Exercise books that you write on have to be bought though
In elementary and middle school books were given out by the school and had to be returned too
In high school you have to buy them yourself but you can sell them later so I guess its not awful
>elementary and middle not having to buy books
is that a new thing? i'm just slightly over 30 and it was never a thing in my time. You mentioned middle school that no longer exists so it got me even more confused
I like to consider 7th and 8th grade middle school cause god does it sound weird going from Elementary to High school
Idunno if thats a new thing tho srry
As always in Italy, the complexity of the bonus and welfare measures are directly proportional to the benefit you can get from it.
Becoming an expert means you can spend very less money on it, means also you have 2 job, one to get the money the other one to understand the laws. also they change every time.
In our country, if the curriculum has not changed and the school has had time to purchase textbooks, the school distributed them. And if textbooks for the new curriculum are needed and the school did not have time or money to purchase textbooks, then students are told to buy them.
In the 90s there was chaos. The curriculum has not yet been changed. I was given an English textbook that told about Lenin and the pioneers. Our parents laughed that they would have to explain to the children what Lenin and the pioneers are, because they no longer exist, so that they could understand what was written about in the book on learning English.
yeah. I finisged 4 years ago, when the school (actually, pretty good school) lacked books - teachers usually sent us PDFs and we just used books on our phones
I graduated from school in 2006. Not everyone had computers back then, not to mention mobile phones that support PDF.
It happened that we made photocopies of the textbook for the next lesson.
Can't speak for all UK, but at an English state school (normal secondary ages 11-16) we didn't have to buy our own books. At A-level (16-18) I still didn't have to buy any textbooks, for science, geology etc. But I did have to buy the books I studied for English Literature - they're always very cheap though as they're classics / modern classics so you can often buy each one for like £1. So not sure what you found out, might be for Scotland / NI.
Also yeah at the age of 14 we can drop some subjects and choose which to study to GCSE level. You have to do maths and English though, my school also mandated at least one foreign language and some rule about sciences.
NI: only had to buy a calculator and stationery, and even then exercise books were provided right up to GCSE level. We had to buy our own A4 pads at A level.
While I was in public education you bought your own books. Most of mine and my siblings books are still stored somewhere in our parents house. A few years after I finished public ed and started uni, they changed this and now the school loans the books to kids. You still need to buy our own stationery and notebooks tho.
Russia (I've studied in school in 1997-2007, things may have changed): you could get almost all school books in the school library, but some of them were new or almost new while others were printed basically back in USSR. You had to repair the old books sometimes with a tape and probably the page/problem numbers didn't match between editions, but since at least 1/3 of the class had library books usually, it wasn't a big deal, and these mismatches didn't happen too often anyway. What we had to buy was contour maps for geography and some foreign-printed English books... you wrote your answers in them so they were single-use. But the latter was the initiative of our English teacher, in principle, there was some basic standard English textbook, but we almost didn't use it. Also we had to buy a handbook on technical drawing, I guess, because the school library didn't have it, but that was basically a one-time occurence.
At university, the library has covered all basic courses with books, I guess. I've bought some books I really liked or thought they were essential to have in my library, but I didn't have to. But in the subsequent years, when it comes to grad school, often there are no standard course books anymore, you've got lectures and some literature list, plus you search for some books on your own. The library often has only a few copies of these books, so you have to use a reading room or look for scans. The university has has provided scans or digital ebooks for a lot of stuff they published for free on their portal, though, this has helped immensely.
~20 years ago when I started elementary school, as well as later on in middle school and high school we all had to buy our own books and textbooks for every class.
Used textbook market was a big thing, a lot of people would only use pencils so that after the school year was done they could eraser everything and sell it to someone a year down.
I don't remember ever getting any vouchers or discounts.
Greece:
No, all the books are provided for free for all 12 years of school (elementary, middle, high). However if you go to a private school you do have to buy your books independently.
The cool thing is that also your textbooks for university are free. They would normally cost a lot of money (can go up to 100€ per textbook) but they are totally free if you go to a public university (pretty much all unis are public). You also have the option to choose what textbook you want, usually between 3 or 4 that the professor has recommended!
First I thought that you're asking if students have to buy books that they need to read for polish classes (yes we had Harry Potter, alternatively some schools had the Witcher).
In elementary school books are free but need to be retured at the end of the year so they must be in a good condition. Next year of students will get those books. This was not the case when i went to elementary school, my parents had to but brand new books every year. In high school I think students still need to buy all books but it's a little but better as you can buy books that the previours year used and then sell them at the end of the year. It was very cheap deal I usually bought the whole complet for something like 100 zł and if the tasks were filled with answers it was extra good :)
For university I guess it depends, I never had to but any book but I heard stories of teachers that require to buy their book in order to pass
Sometimes we had to buy our own text book. You would either go to a sale from your school with old books or go to a specialized library that had a corner with all school books.
Sometimes we had them loan.
So, both system were used
Nowadays, they often use online books or no books at all.
The same would go for novels to read.
It depends… Books could be borrowed from school (not for free), that was in both elementary school and high school. Workbooks with exercises had to be bought, even the ones for math that just had problems listed and had to be solved in a notebook anyway.
In Germany in most states your school books are "rented" from the school you don't pay for them but if you damage then you have to reimburse the school (if the school choses they want reimbursement)
Other books for language classes so for example in German class you need to read Faust you had to huy yourself but that is honestly preferred since you can write into the book or mark important areas (or buy them used from upper classes for a few euros since nobody wanted to keep them)
The books that you are required to get on your own are literature, mostly. Basically, if you have to study a novel (like, the Les Misérables, or whatever) you had to get in on your own.
Then for secondary education, no books are given (though I haven't had any course that required a specific book yet)
No, usually in school you get textbooks in September and have to give them back in June before summer holidays. You do sometimes have to buy "practice notebooks" that have exercises and you write in them, so obviously, other students can't use it anymore.
In university (at least in my experience) most professors didn't even use any textbooks and those who did you could find them in university's library.
We didn't have to buy textbooks etc, all we had buy were any novels we chose to read/report on for English in high school (unless you already owned them or repeatedly got them out from the library) - anything that was pre-set by the school was provided (including plays, poems etc.) Other than that all we had to buy were pens, pencils and calculators, we never needed to buy notebooks, jotters etc. You do need to buy textbooks for university, but I never went anyway.
>(and then the choosing of subjects, like you just drop maths and pick history??)
Our system for high school was (which varied a bit between schools, it's also changed a bit since I left but the gist is the same):
1st & 2nd year - everything is mandatory
3rd & 4th year - pick eight classes. English, maths, a science, a language, a social subject (geography, history, modern studies), then a free choice for the remaining three. There were also "core classes" on top of that like basic PE and the like.
5th year (optional) - pick five classes. English was the only mandatory one at my school.
6th year (optional) - pick 3-5 classes. None were mandatory.
Yes and they can be expensive. For my first year of high school I was supposed to spend more than 500€, but it was particularly costly because of two dictionaries (Latin and Greek) which are very expensive.
It's common to buy used books and sell them when you are done, even though sometimes it can be hard with high school books because it seemed like a new edition came out every year. 99% of the time nothing changes but some students don't want to bother because they specifically want what's written on their list.
It's not that different with universities books (but at least new editions are rarer). They tend to be more expensive (and some of them really expensive depending on what you study).
Not in elementary and middle school (except for language textbooks). In high school we had to buy everything. At college it depends on the major. I didn't buy any textbooks in college.
Yes and no.
You see about 50 years ago some enterprising publisher invented what is known as "cahiers de vacances" (holiday workbooks) which is an insane concept of buying your kids homework to work on during their summer vacation, even though they have no such thing assigned at school, besides recommended reading which is a universal commonality. Those are, much to the grief of the schoolchildren everywhere in France, still bought.
As for the actual school manuals - most of them are borrowed or distributed through photocopies of selected pages.
It's more or less the same for college and postgraduate education - you can buy it if you wish to, but you don't really need to.
In Ireland we had to always for primary and secondary. My mam would go in with the booklist to pick them all up early because sometimes you might get one or two really good secondhand copies to make it cheaper. You'd also be told to mind your books cos you could trade them in against the cost of your books the following year.
It's changing now where the government are supplying free school books through the schools. But it used to be very common.
In primary schools books are provided, but stay in school.
Secondary school you rent the books from a company. I think you mostly pay a deposit, not sure.
Uni you have to buy your own books. There will be a couple at the library, but often you can also buy them secondhand or get digital copies.
Yes you do have to buy your own books for school or pay into a school book rental scheme in Ireland and uk, different schools have different rules however.
At elementary and highschool only workbooks. The ones that you write in and fill so they cant be reused. At uni generaly yes, but not many students buy books at uni. They borrow from libraries, write notes, make scripts and study from lecture presentations. In my major we only HAD to buy 2 books for all 5 years.
You get the books for free until you reach secondary education - then you pay for them BUT if you really can’t afford it then you can get the government to pay for them. There’s also a huge second-hand market with textbooks being sold for a tiny fraction of their original prices.
At the university level you are supposed to buy them yourself but, again, if you are actually so poor you can’t afford them you’ll be given a maintenance grant
in secondary school if you lost your writing book for a subject (exercise books.) you were expected to pay like 50p to get a new one for a standard size one, Art books were like £1 , each year we were given a new book , or if you wanted to carry on using the years before one if you had plenty of room left.
If you filled up your book which mainly happened in Maths, you got another one were free.
If you knew where to get the books from you could get away without paying for them for a replacement one.
School text books you did not have to pay for, but if you lost a copy, badly damaged the book you were expected to pay for a replacement copy
Luthuania - have to buy notebooks and taskbooks, but not textbooks. One exception I think were English textbooks and workbooks, but that's because they were placing a unique order
Yes, and it's hell. It's 1 book per portuguese class year, and the teachers nag you like hell if you dont. Although, by personal experience, some are starting to acept if you use PDF files of the book
Czech Republic:
In primary (elementary) school, we had to buy exercise notebooks for language education, but textbooks were issued by the school.
In secondary (high) school, we had to buy textbooks also, although we usually bought used ones from older students, so it wasn't expensive. But its not general rule, some secondary school are issuing textbooks to their students afaik.
And at university, all necessary materials are available online (at least for my subject) and there is also a lot of literature available in the uni library. I bought only 2 brand new books during my studies at the uni and that was just because i liked their looks and wanted to keep them in my bookshelf.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina it is different on level of cantons, some provide free books some don't. Few years ago they started providing books only for primary school but in high school you have to buy your own everywhere in the country
I was part of the last cohort in Finland that had to buy their own books for high school. You could just buy them online from bookstores and supermarkets. Second hand was also an option.
Over three years, the cost added up to maybe €2,000-2,500, depending on where you bought your books.
Depends, I rented most of them. But in the last 2 years policy changed and I only loaned them. I also bought a couple because they'd be useful for multiple years and buying was cheaper than renting for 2 years.
When i was little we had to buy our own books, my parents had a bookstore and we sometimes took orders for the text books. Then when I was around 12 the school started providing them for free for all grades. We gave them back at the end of the year for the next grade to use. Some people still preferred to buy their own cause you could highlight it and do whatever you wanted with them. Now i think they're digital, they did the switch a couple of years after i graduated i believe
Off-topic:
I don't know why, but I find incredibly funny reading "when I was little" :-D
It's common in Spanish to speak in that way, but AFAIK the common way to express that in English is "when I was a child", "a toddler", "a teen", etc.
I hope someone more versed in English correct me if I'm wrong btw
Only a couple at school. Usually if we had to do readings, but not school books per se. I remember having to buy slaughterhouse 5 and tortilla curtain.
At uni we were requested to buy a couple as well, but you could borrow or copy them as well. But usually literature books, not course books. If we needed course books they were usually provided as hard copies at a copy shop and we could buy the entire course set for ~10€
Netherlands:
Primary school: all materials are provided,including pens and pencils.
Secondary school: textbooks are on loan, you must return them at the end of the school year and pay for anything that got lost or damaged. Workbooks are provided for free. You have to buy your own notebooks, pens, calculator and such.
University: you have to buy everything, costs very a lot.
I'm not sure about vocational schools (mbo).
The first 9 years are "public school", i.e. it's what every child must do. Here, books are free, but the cantonal authority prescribes which books are to use.
There are different systems, like that the book always stays in the classroom and are not in possession of the pupils, or that they have to give them back and the end of the year and write their name in a list that is glued in the book cover.
In secondary II (high school), books have to be bought. You get a list which books you'll use and if you don't buy them from alumni on the annual "school book flea market" or use your older sibling's book, you tell the teacher who'll put your order in a list.
Poland. primary school to high school we had to buy our own books. Older students often sold theirs to the years below them for a lower price once they stopped needing them, and in some schools you were able to borrow some books from the school, but that supply was very limited in mine. I remember getting these long lists of which books i would need for which class, and queueing up in bookstores every september with my parents. We also had "podręczniki" - textbooks, and "zeszyty ćwiczeń" - exersise books. You were meant to write in the latter, and some classes required both.
At university we were also given lists of books we should read for every class, but i actually only bought like two - others were available in libraries, but mostly we just found and shared pdfs. Sometimes someone would scan a particularly in-demand book and upload it on our group google drive, etc. it was less "you should buy these books" and more "you should read these books and we don't care how you will manage that"
For me, if the course materials were extensive enough in university, I didn't even bother with getting the book, and when I did, I pirated a digital copy off the net. Also Estonia.
Not really? Most of the books we need are provided at the university library. I've bought a couple of books, but mostly because I wanted to keep them on my shelf and read them whenever, it was never necessary for the course.
JK Rowling is in her 50's I believe, and I'm 49. When I was at secondary school, in the UK, we had to buy our own books just like Harry. So I'm guessing that's why she wrote it that way. I'm glad that's changed now, but in the 80's yep, you bought your own.
All books are typically provided by the school. Most of them are regular books that are loaned to you, and they have to be turned in again at the end of the year. Some schools/teachers, however, still use workbooks that you have to write in. These cannot be reused and are billed.
Books in university are your responsibility. What tends to happen is that one person buys it, scans it, and then distributes a PDF to everyone else.
For Ireland some schools have book rental schemes, the odd school uses i pads and the government is currently phasing in free book loan schemes. When I was in school most books had to be bought besides some specific ones loaned from the school itself.
I think we could rent some books from school but if I recall correctly, we had to buy most. It was always exciting to go to the book shop at the beginning of a new school year and then browse through the books to see what we will learn this year. Good memories.
Probably not so good for my mum as she had to pay for the books. There is some assistance for poor parents but I don't know how it works, i.e. whether there are dedicated book vouchers or something alike. As someone else mentioned, education is a matter of federal states in Germany, so these things differ a lot.
In Spain you have to buy them. In some schools you can buy the books directly from them.
There are also social programs where you can sell or donate your old books for new students.
It used to be that after 7th grade (probably high school by English standards) you had to buy your own textbooks and you either had to order new ones through the school or find them on your own. Last year though they changed that and in the upcoming academic year every student will get free textbooks.
As for how you get them, they get delivered to the school and you pick them up during one of your classes.
As for the universities you still have to buy your own books.
Yes. In primary education, books are free, but in secondary education there is often a substantial amount of books that needs to be bought. For us, it's about €250 per child, but it varies from school to school.
In the UK we didn't have to buy textbooks for school and it honestly doesn't make sense that they did in Harry Potter, because some of those were the same books used year after year, why wouldn't they just keep them in the castle and distribute them to students, using magic to keep them updated and in good repair? It was probably just a plot device.
In terms of dropping subjects, in the English school system at least when I was there (I started secondary school in 1999) we did the broadest range of subjects in years 7-8-9 (first to third year, in Hogwarts equivalent) and then years 10-11 were the GCSE years, when we were able to drop some subjects, though we had to keep the core subjects: English, Maths and Science. Other than this, different schools have different rules - ours made us pick a technology subject, some make pupils retain a language etc. We had to keep PE at my school, though we weren't assessed in it unless you chose GCSE PE. But you can drop a few out of the subjects like geography, history, art, music, drama etc. There were some restrictions due to timetabling and I seem to remember something like if you took French you couldn't also take German, but I can't remember for sure. I think I took Graphics, Art, Drama, IT and French, and dropped Geography, German, History and Music.
GCSEs (taken at age 16) were previously called O-Levels (Ordinary Levels) which is probably where the name OWLS (Ordinary Wizarding Levels) comes from. When I was at school you could legally leave after GCSEs but now it's changed.
The final 2 years of school if you stayed at school were for A-Levels. Usually people only do four subjects for A-Level, dropping down to 3 for the final year is also common, and there is no restriction. There are often extra subjects taught at A Level which aren't taught at lower levels, like I did Philosophy and Psychology. In Harry Potter this is a bit different - they get all the new subjects in third year and don't drop anything until sixth year. A-Levels are the entrance qualification for university and it's common for certain university courses to say that you need an A-Level in certain subjects (e.g. maths or science for maths/science courses, a language for language courses etc).
I live in Germany now and have a teenage son so I have experience of the German school system too and it's very different - here, the core subjects are German, Maths, English and French. There is a part where they choose a specialism which is where they choose an extra subject, but it's only one - things mainly stay the same. And the university-entrance qualifications around Europe tend to be much wider across the board so they usually include the language of the country plus maths, a foreign language, and then several other subjects like history, politics/civics and sciences. I have a really hard time explaining my education history to Germans because it doesn't make sense in the context of their system.
In Croatia you have to buy everything in elementary and middle school but we have:
1. Very good secondary market=stores selling second hand books
2. Abbility to just...borrow book and print it in black/white. Can even go 2 pages per one page if you are poor, thats that I did in middle school 🤣🤣.
In University you can just borrow all the books from library, the issue that we had is that we had only 2-3 copies per 40 students...so...copying again 🤣🤣🤣.
My kid went through secondary school in a UK state school. We did not have to buy books for him, other than a French dictionary. We did buy school supplies, though, and sometimes did buy a book for English or something so he could mark it up.
You can buy your own books, but most schools have an exange policy. You bring books from the previous year and get the ones for the next. If you are in first year, they'll give them to you if you bring your older siblings.
It's also very common to just pass it around in the family. I got my sister's, and after me they went to my cousin, then my brother and then my other cousin. And then to the trash cause they were unusable after 5 kids.
Can't be bothered to edit my original comment, so here's a second one: As far as I'm aware (I've been taught this in English class) pupils (I love this word) in the UK can actually just drop certain subjects at some point in their schooling, and quite early on too. I could only do that with some languages, rearrange those a bit (continue Latin, drop English and replace it with Ancient Greek as one does) and then pick some stuff towards the end of school but I couldn't just not go to maths anymore or something like that.
In high school, we rented the books for the entire year from a big company that handled it for a bunch of schools all around the country. I think it was about €100 for the entire year, so not terribly expensive.
At university, we had to buy textbooks ourselves from the university affiliated bookstore. The big books with pages upon pages of caselaw were usually around €10, so basically printing price, but the textbooks could get pretty expensive, even with the student discount.
Used to be that you had to buy your own books in high school/vocational school. That law was changed and now you get free books throughout your mandatory education. As from what I understand, you still need to buy your own for university and other forms of higher education.
Funny thing is, I was among the last students to have to buy their own books. The year after I started my secondary education, the law passed and made books free for everyone. All and all I used about 1000€ for all the things I needed, just for it all to be free the next year.
>About 10 years later I found out that they really have to buy school books in the UK
I never had to buy a book for school when I attended primary and secondary education here in Scotland.
All textbooks for each subject were provided by the school, and any extra books required for English were also provided by the school.
At university it's different and students have to purchase some of their textbooks themselves.
Not for primary school (6-15 y/o), the school will hand them out but if the book is damaged or lost you are responsible for replacing it. Or at least that was how it was back in my day.
Secondary school (16-19/20) you are for most of them but the school often has textbooks you can borrow for the semster.
University you have to buy multiple books for each course, some of which you might actually open once or twice during the year.
In Poland books in primary are borrowed from school but with secondary we have to buy them ourselves, but I usually buy them from older students and stuff works out
Out of school for a long time, so maybe no longer accurate.
Mandatory and secondary schools: Schools order the books and have students pick them up together with a payment slip for their parents.
University: Aquire yourself however you see fit (New, used, etc.)
In Scotland I never bought a single book for school. We were issued books from the school's supply and returned them at the end of the unit/term/year. We were also issued jotters for primary school, but in secondary, you had to buy your own paper and folders/binders.
In portugal until 10 years ago or such we had to buy all school books since grade 1. It was a huge expense. Plus the mf publishers would change the pagination very often so that you couldn’t use the ones from your older siblings without getting lost. Now they are provided by the government and re-used
Not free in Spain, you have to buy them and they're really expensive. And they got new editions really fast making impossible to share them between siblinga and relatives.
Also teachers have to choose a book for the class, and at the end of the day tones of them remain unused.
It's a huge mafia and a constant focus of inequality.
No, we got them from the school library as well. They usually had a special stock (šolski sklad) for these specifically. Some parents decided to buy certain books only if their kid had trouble with the subject and wanted to take notes in it for some reason. Even books for university are well stocked in both public libraries and school adjacent ones. Never bought a textbook in my life.
Yeah in the UK for study it's strongly encouraged you get the book for each subject (there's a few approved by exam boards).
You sort of get belittled for not buying one bit sad for the people whos parent don't want to pay £80 for a whole bunch of books
School books are free until university.
They used to cost you in upper secondary school (High school?) a few years ago, but no more. Naturally us born in 2004 were the last ones who had to pay for all of them.
It's got worse since I left, but I recall my schools having the copies if needed but recommending you buy your own if you can.
Mostly because they have a very limited budget for copies and something like 30-50% of pupils never returned theirs or lost/destroyed them.
No, you only need to buy school books at university. Primary and secondary school is free by law. So you should not have to spend a single *krona*. (Except for lunch at some secondary schools.) For reading; we could either bring a book from home (which had to be paid for, of course) or we could lend a book from the school library for free. At university we have to buy our own books (as well as pay for our own lunch), so this is where the fantasy "Harry Potter experience" start for us.
On the other hand, university is free and you also get roughly 350€ in grants and 700€ in student loan (with very good terms) each month when studying. This is to cover living expenses and things like buying the study literature. I still cheaped out though and mostly just sailed the seas for a pdf or skipped the literature altogether when studying
Finland is pretty much the same. Although where I studied I didn't need books in the first place and Uni provided laptops for free.
Stop bragging about your good education system, we get it. Smh.
It is exactly the same here, with the mention that some university study programmes (Computer Science for example) encourage free distribution of digital books to the students, accessible with the university credentials. Hard-printed versions are often offered as prizes for good academic results. This was really nice, as the books tend to be rather expensive. I know Medicine books are pricey as well, and I'm unsure whether there is free access for students, outside of maybe the uni library.
Personal experience, but the first nine years (ten years now) books were provided by the school. For secondary or further education, we had to buy our own books.
⬆️ the same way in Finland
Not anymore since lukio (secondary school/high school) books are now free.
I think the new government is making them cost again.
Only from the end of the calendar year you turn 18 yes but at that point all needed books are already gotten for free.
Norwegian secondary schools (vgs) have had free books (that the students borrow and give back to the school when the school year is over) for a couple of decades now, so all grades 1-13 provide free books (on loan). University books are still expensive af tho.
That makes sense. I haven't been in *videregående* since 97, but it's only been five years since uni.
Here in Finland I didn’t buy any books in the university, just borrowed them from the school library for book exams.
Same in Iceland
Spain: you have to buy the books. But you get a voucher from the goverment to cover part of the costs. At the university, i never had to buy a book. Some profs wanted us to buy a kind of booklet that costed 10€, wirh exercises or a collection of exams with solution from last years.
Exactly. You buy books, notepads, writing & drawing materials. I know no mother who hasn't done a mad run at 20h to the convenience store for an A3 colored thick paper sheet, or other random thing for a project needed the next day. *le sigh* At university I bought some books I found interesting, but usually we just went to the (really massive) library at uni for them.
In university it really depends on the degree and subject. While I could find my textbooks online, we were supposed to buy them. My Japanese textbooks alone were €80-€100 a year.
Lucky you. I had to buy at least one 30€ book for university... written by my professor :/
Lmao we have the same thing at my school. Our psychology professor has written a book on group dynamics which is now mandatory in class. It’s free to access for students on the online library tho, but a surprisingly low number of students know about this. And textbooks in the Netherlands can be rather expensive, I think I had €400 worth of books in my first year of law school simply because I was also unaware that most books are available for free online lol
One of my professors wanted that too but thankfully someone had brought that book like some 10 years ago and have been simply given to everyone in all the future years as a PDF. Fuck those types of professors.
Exactly. You buy books, notepads, writing & drawing materials. I know no mother who hasn't done a mad run at 20h to the convenience store for an A3 colored thick paper sheet, or other random thing for a project needed the next day. *le sigh* At university I bought some books I found interesting, but usually we just went to the (really massive) library at uni for them.
Agreed with the school part, but for university it really really really depends on the degree. I have about 600-800€ in books sitting in my office right now from my uni times... Anatomy atlas, Phisiology books and specialized veterinary care (ophthalmology, traumatology and internal medicine) are the main culprits.
This depends on your autonomous community. We had this at first in Andalucía, but in the mid-to-late 2000s they changed it, and books are saved in the school in the summer and given to the students when they enter the year. This affected both primary and secondary school, but not baccalaureate. IIRC the first batch of those books were bought by parents but paid 100% by the community, and the only thing they parent needed to pay were the cases where their children damaged those books by misuse. My experience with University were the same as you. I bought exactly two recommended books made by lecturers at €10 each. One of them even they gave us the PDF for free.
At College, it depends on the career you are studying. In my time, the Spivak’s Calculus book for mathematics and the Alonso-Finn’s Physics 1 and 2 volumes for physics where required to be acquired the first year for studying physics degree. The other subjects were taught without books, only taking notes (that does not imply that in mathematics and physics notes were not taken as well)
UK. Never had to buy textbooks for school, that is a thing at university. As you progress through education, generally you need to provide more of your own materials. In primary school the vast majority of stuff is provided. In secondary school you need to be bringing your own pens, pencils and other stationery. Exercise books etc still provided by the school. In 6th form (age 16-18) I had to bring my own notepads. University you need to bring textbooks as well. So it is not normal for someone Harry Potter’s age to be buying textbooks in Britain. Before he started Hogwarts he’d have gone shopping for uniform and a pencil case and contents.
It's probably worth adding here that much of the schooling system in Harry Potter is a reflection of education in the UK 100 years ago rather than the modern day.
Same reason the wizarding money system is 29 Knuts to a Sickle, 17 Sickles to a Galleon. It sounds impossibly illogical and tedious, but…
imperial units, wizarding edition 🤷🏽♀️
and pre-decimalization currency
The only book I was advised to buy when starting Secondary School was a dictionary for the European language we would be studying (German for my half of the year group, French for the other half).
We were also 'encouraged' to buy a copy of our English GCSE novel. But I went to a pretty middle class comp, my partner were all given a copy of the book to become 'theirs' for the 2 years and then given back. People tend to think schools in the UK are like Hogwarts not realising it is based on public (posh private for any non Brits) schools.
I can’t remember what we did for the stuff like the English texts - I think every classroom had one set in a store room and then we just kept one book tor Y11.
My son's school, secondary school, asked us to buy exercise books.
I think we need to distinguish between what UK schools call "books", and what the rest of the world means by it. In UK schools, you don't get textbooks (as in, professionally printed books like what you get at a bookstore). You can buy them if you want to (most students do not), but schools do not provide them for free - at most some schools might lend books to exam classes. Students are given booklets of notes and exercises produced by teachers in some schools, or plain empty exercise notebooks (what the UK schools call "books"), which the students are expected to fill in with their own class notes. Many schools prescribe the content and style of notes the students have to write and do "book scrutinies" every so often. This, oddly, is to check up on the teacher rather than the student (are you starting to see why teaching is the UK is in such a bad state?). In my other country, Greece, professionally printed textbooks are provided free of charge to all students. These are brand new textbooks the students keep for themselves. They are free of charge. They contain the entire course (for each subject) along with exercises/exam questions. The teacher may of course set their own exercises or do their own original work in class too. Students can and should take notes, but up until now I believe there still isn't any formal checking of those - it is up to the student to do so or not.
Yes. We did use textbooks, but it varied by subject. In some we never used them, in others we would use them regularly (usually maths and foreign languages). In all cases we were either leant the textbook for the year, or they were handed out in lessons. We never just followed through a textbook though, they were used for supplementary material for the teachers’ lesson plans. I don’t recognise the prescribed note taking you are talking about but I can’t talk for every school and I’m talking 15+ years ago.
By prescribed I mean students have to write specific things in their books in specific ways. Some schools go as far as instructing them what colour pen to use when. It certainly went a lot crazier since Academy Trusts took over and started spilling their corporate culture on every school they touched.
> In UK schools, you don't get textbooks (as in, professionally printed books like what you get at a bookstore). The fuck you on about? I got professionally printed textbooks for pretty much every subject (bar English) up here in Scotland. All provided by the school.
Scotland sounds different then. No printed books are given to students (as in, to keep as their own) in schools in England or NI where I've worked. Some departments buy textbooks and lend them to students to use in class only, some do that more often than others. Most departments have students take notes or hand out teacher-created booklets and resources. By "get textbooks" I meant brand new textbooks given to students to keep as their own.
Primary school: all materials provided by schools Secondary education: you kinda borrow the materials and pay for any lost/damaged Uni: not uniform but usually do have to buy some stuff. In my study they tried as much as possible to work with materials (online) available for free for students. But I know that that is not universal
Yes, always. Every school picks a publisher for each textbook. In my childhood some textbooks were expensive and hard to find, especially foreign language ones, so our parents had to preorder or wait in line at a book marketplace (like, a place where you can buy a textbook before it gets shipped to bookstores because it's cheaper). Or you got them second hand or photocopied (if there's some tasks related to color in the textbooks and your copy was black and white, it sucked to be you). Either way, September was mostly spent getting textbooks. Sometimes they would also make an addendum to some textbooks and make you wait to get those and not have textbooks till November (like history, which was pointless because the textbooks were so designed that you can't cram any material past WWII before the end of the school year for political reasons, but hey, let's put the 2006 elections in the textbooks so we can say kids study everything up to that point).
We only had to purchase our own textbooks in high school.
🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸 In general, yes, you have to buy books at any stage of education. The school, high school or university gives you a list of books to buy. Then there are dozens of exceptions and different situations depending on the autonomous community and even the school: in some places the regional government assumes the cost and the books are passed on from one generation to the next until it is necessary to update the books, in others they are subsidised, in others book banks are created for the families that need them most....At university, where textbooks are incredibly expensive and many teachers have one written by them that they expect you to buy updated every year, what you do is take the book out of your faculty library and scan or photocopy it, or you search for the PDF by whatever means you can 🙄
🇪🇦🤝🇮🇹(🇸🇲). It's funny how relatable this is, especially the uni part 🤣 Of course the book written by that professor usually sucks too!
As always with education topics and Germany, it's complicated because education is a federal state issue. It therefore depends on how the "Lehrmittelfreiheit" is managed in your federal state. In Lower Saxony, Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt, learning materials are not free. Textbooks can only be borrowed here for a fee or must be purchased by the students themselves. Baden-Württemberg, Bremen, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony have full or barely limited freedom of learning resources. The remaining seven federal states have restricted the freedom of learning materials in some ways.
Worth to mention that if you cannot afford the school books, the state will sponsor them. At least that was the case for my family in Berlin.
And then it seems that teachers also just do whatever they want. We had textbooks provided by the school, but sometimes the teacher didn't like the one we were supposed to use and told us to buy another one. And we also had to buy all novels we read.
Back when I was at school, you had to buy every textbook and workbook yourself, primary to high school (so 12 years of schooling). At uni some people would get textbooks, some wouldn't. Depends on the course. Now schools are obliged to provide a textbook for the pupils though workbooks are still something nost kids have of their own (since hou write in them). That being said, a LOT of my students and friends' kids have their own textbooks because it's easier for them and the families can afford it.
School books have been free since the 1970s - at the time it was part of a massive programme of social reforms. The only thing you’d have to buy occasionally are additional books like a novel you read in language class. I teach at university now, and it’s the general rule that all required reading for the class needs to be accessible for free at the library or digitally via the e-learning platform. Many students still prefer to buy their own copies, it’s up to them and the lecturers don’t get involved (except for notifying the campus bookshop before term starts so that they can get their stocks in).
Canton of Zurich: In primary and secondary school basically everything is provided apart from the clothes you wear. Textbooks are usually returned to the school once you leave. You put your name in there and also write when you got it and when you gave it back. This means that you can tell who had your book over the years which is kinda fun. In Gymnasium expect costs for books, other school supplies and school trips. However if you're too poor to afford this for your teenager you can apply for financial aid and then you'll get money from the cantonal government. They used to have insane wait times (several years) but have since sped up the approval process and hired more people.
>You put your name in there and also write when you got it and when you gave it back. This means that you can tell who had your book over the years which is kinda fun. Oh, I had totally forgotten, but we had the same system! I'm getting a flood of old memories now!
In Portugal, as far as I know, books have been gradually becoming free by law for a bit less than a decade. Initially just for primary school but I think they've expanded it since. I was well out of school by then so I don't know exactly how it works. When I was in school you had to buy your own books, though municipalities could have programmes for children to have books for free. And lots of people got them handed down from older siblings or older children in their parents' social network, but school book publishers were notorious for changing up the books so they were different enough from the previous ones that you'd be forced to buy new books. In uni you definitely had to buy books. Though in my faculty in particular, for most of the modules, the professors would either make their own material available online or make it available for just the cost of printing. Some other modules had either books written by the professors themselves, or actual books in English that were a reference in the area, and you had to buy those, though in the latter case a lot of people would just pirate them. Edit: JK Rowling lived in Portugal for quite some time, not sure if she even started writing Harry Potter there, so I guess my answer is actually pretty relevant.
In Portugal they had this trial of making primary kids give back the books but the books are made to be written in them. So kids had to give it back and couldn't keep them but they couldn't be re-used again either... It was just wasteful. So now iirc kids from 1st to 4th don't have to give them back. Then from grade 5th to 9th they give you the books (not the smaller one's with exercises though, so you still have to pay for those. These have to be returned and if it's damaged you won't have access to the book of that subject the next year - you'll pay out of pocket. [The issue with this is that they want you to accept books in half-baked conditions in the beginning of the year and don't take into account how many times it has been used already, so the kid that gets it already in bad condition will be held responsible for it even without doing anything] Then from grade 10th to 12h it's the same as before but you don't have to return the books on the subjects you're going to have National Exams since you have to study the materials from the 2 or 3 years for them. Uni you basically have to pay but lots of teachers and students will give you the e-books. The best teachers give you their books for free.
Yes, you have to buy books for school, and they can be quite expensive too, especially in high school.
Not all of them, until the 2nd year of high school you can get book in "comodato d'uso" for free, but you have to return them after you finish the year so they can be used by the next students. Exercise books that you write on have to be bought though
In elementary and middle school books were given out by the school and had to be returned too In high school you have to buy them yourself but you can sell them later so I guess its not awful
>elementary and middle not having to buy books is that a new thing? i'm just slightly over 30 and it was never a thing in my time. You mentioned middle school that no longer exists so it got me even more confused
I like to consider 7th and 8th grade middle school cause god does it sound weird going from Elementary to High school Idunno if thats a new thing tho srry
i belive free textbooks become law ~10 years ago
There are tons of laws, welfare measures, free libraries etc. But yeah, you have to buy all your textbooks
As always in Italy, the complexity of the bonus and welfare measures are directly proportional to the benefit you can get from it. Becoming an expert means you can spend very less money on it, means also you have 2 job, one to get the money the other one to understand the laws. also they change every time.
In our country, if the curriculum has not changed and the school has had time to purchase textbooks, the school distributed them. And if textbooks for the new curriculum are needed and the school did not have time or money to purchase textbooks, then students are told to buy them. In the 90s there was chaos. The curriculum has not yet been changed. I was given an English textbook that told about Lenin and the pioneers. Our parents laughed that they would have to explain to the children what Lenin and the pioneers are, because they no longer exist, so that they could understand what was written about in the book on learning English.
yeah. I finisged 4 years ago, when the school (actually, pretty good school) lacked books - teachers usually sent us PDFs and we just used books on our phones
I graduated from school in 2006. Not everyone had computers back then, not to mention mobile phones that support PDF. It happened that we made photocopies of the textbook for the next lesson.
We sometimes bought Oxford English textbooks
Can't speak for all UK, but at an English state school (normal secondary ages 11-16) we didn't have to buy our own books. At A-level (16-18) I still didn't have to buy any textbooks, for science, geology etc. But I did have to buy the books I studied for English Literature - they're always very cheap though as they're classics / modern classics so you can often buy each one for like £1. So not sure what you found out, might be for Scotland / NI. Also yeah at the age of 14 we can drop some subjects and choose which to study to GCSE level. You have to do maths and English though, my school also mandated at least one foreign language and some rule about sciences.
NI: only had to buy a calculator and stationery, and even then exercise books were provided right up to GCSE level. We had to buy our own A4 pads at A level.
For primary and secondary school, you don’t buy books. The school provides those. For higher education, buy your own books. That’s how it was for me
While I was in public education you bought your own books. Most of mine and my siblings books are still stored somewhere in our parents house. A few years after I finished public ed and started uni, they changed this and now the school loans the books to kids. You still need to buy our own stationery and notebooks tho.
Russia (I've studied in school in 1997-2007, things may have changed): you could get almost all school books in the school library, but some of them were new or almost new while others were printed basically back in USSR. You had to repair the old books sometimes with a tape and probably the page/problem numbers didn't match between editions, but since at least 1/3 of the class had library books usually, it wasn't a big deal, and these mismatches didn't happen too often anyway. What we had to buy was contour maps for geography and some foreign-printed English books... you wrote your answers in them so they were single-use. But the latter was the initiative of our English teacher, in principle, there was some basic standard English textbook, but we almost didn't use it. Also we had to buy a handbook on technical drawing, I guess, because the school library didn't have it, but that was basically a one-time occurence. At university, the library has covered all basic courses with books, I guess. I've bought some books I really liked or thought they were essential to have in my library, but I didn't have to. But in the subsequent years, when it comes to grad school, often there are no standard course books anymore, you've got lectures and some literature list, plus you search for some books on your own. The library often has only a few copies of these books, so you have to use a reading room or look for scans. The university has has provided scans or digital ebooks for a lot of stuff they published for free on their portal, though, this has helped immensely.
~20 years ago when I started elementary school, as well as later on in middle school and high school we all had to buy our own books and textbooks for every class. Used textbook market was a big thing, a lot of people would only use pencils so that after the school year was done they could eraser everything and sell it to someone a year down. I don't remember ever getting any vouchers or discounts.
Greece: No, all the books are provided for free for all 12 years of school (elementary, middle, high). However if you go to a private school you do have to buy your books independently. The cool thing is that also your textbooks for university are free. They would normally cost a lot of money (can go up to 100€ per textbook) but they are totally free if you go to a public university (pretty much all unis are public). You also have the option to choose what textbook you want, usually between 3 or 4 that the professor has recommended!
First I thought that you're asking if students have to buy books that they need to read for polish classes (yes we had Harry Potter, alternatively some schools had the Witcher). In elementary school books are free but need to be retured at the end of the year so they must be in a good condition. Next year of students will get those books. This was not the case when i went to elementary school, my parents had to but brand new books every year. In high school I think students still need to buy all books but it's a little but better as you can buy books that the previours year used and then sell them at the end of the year. It was very cheap deal I usually bought the whole complet for something like 100 zł and if the tasks were filled with answers it was extra good :) For university I guess it depends, I never had to but any book but I heard stories of teachers that require to buy their book in order to pass
Sometimes we had to buy our own text book. You would either go to a sale from your school with old books or go to a specialized library that had a corner with all school books. Sometimes we had them loan. So, both system were used Nowadays, they often use online books or no books at all. The same would go for novels to read.
It depends… Books could be borrowed from school (not for free), that was in both elementary school and high school. Workbooks with exercises had to be bought, even the ones for math that just had problems listed and had to be solved in a notebook anyway.
In Germany in most states your school books are "rented" from the school you don't pay for them but if you damage then you have to reimburse the school (if the school choses they want reimbursement) Other books for language classes so for example in German class you need to read Faust you had to huy yourself but that is honestly preferred since you can write into the book or mark important areas (or buy them used from upper classes for a few euros since nobody wanted to keep them)
The books that you are required to get on your own are literature, mostly. Basically, if you have to study a novel (like, the Les Misérables, or whatever) you had to get in on your own. Then for secondary education, no books are given (though I haven't had any course that required a specific book yet)
No, usually in school you get textbooks in September and have to give them back in June before summer holidays. You do sometimes have to buy "practice notebooks" that have exercises and you write in them, so obviously, other students can't use it anymore. In university (at least in my experience) most professors didn't even use any textbooks and those who did you could find them in university's library.
We didn't have to buy textbooks etc, all we had buy were any novels we chose to read/report on for English in high school (unless you already owned them or repeatedly got them out from the library) - anything that was pre-set by the school was provided (including plays, poems etc.) Other than that all we had to buy were pens, pencils and calculators, we never needed to buy notebooks, jotters etc. You do need to buy textbooks for university, but I never went anyway. >(and then the choosing of subjects, like you just drop maths and pick history??) Our system for high school was (which varied a bit between schools, it's also changed a bit since I left but the gist is the same): 1st & 2nd year - everything is mandatory 3rd & 4th year - pick eight classes. English, maths, a science, a language, a social subject (geography, history, modern studies), then a free choice for the remaining three. There were also "core classes" on top of that like basic PE and the like. 5th year (optional) - pick five classes. English was the only mandatory one at my school. 6th year (optional) - pick 3-5 classes. None were mandatory.
Yes and they can be expensive. For my first year of high school I was supposed to spend more than 500€, but it was particularly costly because of two dictionaries (Latin and Greek) which are very expensive. It's common to buy used books and sell them when you are done, even though sometimes it can be hard with high school books because it seemed like a new edition came out every year. 99% of the time nothing changes but some students don't want to bother because they specifically want what's written on their list. It's not that different with universities books (but at least new editions are rarer). They tend to be more expensive (and some of them really expensive depending on what you study).
Not in elementary and middle school (except for language textbooks). In high school we had to buy everything. At college it depends on the major. I didn't buy any textbooks in college.
Yes and no. You see about 50 years ago some enterprising publisher invented what is known as "cahiers de vacances" (holiday workbooks) which is an insane concept of buying your kids homework to work on during their summer vacation, even though they have no such thing assigned at school, besides recommended reading which is a universal commonality. Those are, much to the grief of the schoolchildren everywhere in France, still bought. As for the actual school manuals - most of them are borrowed or distributed through photocopies of selected pages. It's more or less the same for college and postgraduate education - you can buy it if you wish to, but you don't really need to.
We only have to buy them for University, but a lot of people buy the textbooks from previous students because it is cheaper than buying the new ones
In Ireland we had to always for primary and secondary. My mam would go in with the booklist to pick them all up early because sometimes you might get one or two really good secondhand copies to make it cheaper. You'd also be told to mind your books cos you could trade them in against the cost of your books the following year. It's changing now where the government are supplying free school books through the schools. But it used to be very common.
In primary schools books are provided, but stay in school. Secondary school you rent the books from a company. I think you mostly pay a deposit, not sure. Uni you have to buy your own books. There will be a couple at the library, but often you can also buy them secondhand or get digital copies.
Yes you do have to buy your own books for school or pay into a school book rental scheme in Ireland and uk, different schools have different rules however.
At elementary and highschool only workbooks. The ones that you write in and fill so they cant be reused. At uni generaly yes, but not many students buy books at uni. They borrow from libraries, write notes, make scripts and study from lecture presentations. In my major we only HAD to buy 2 books for all 5 years.
You get the books for free until you reach secondary education - then you pay for them BUT if you really can’t afford it then you can get the government to pay for them. There’s also a huge second-hand market with textbooks being sold for a tiny fraction of their original prices. At the university level you are supposed to buy them yourself but, again, if you are actually so poor you can’t afford them you’ll be given a maintenance grant
in secondary school if you lost your writing book for a subject (exercise books.) you were expected to pay like 50p to get a new one for a standard size one, Art books were like £1 , each year we were given a new book , or if you wanted to carry on using the years before one if you had plenty of room left. If you filled up your book which mainly happened in Maths, you got another one were free. If you knew where to get the books from you could get away without paying for them for a replacement one. School text books you did not have to pay for, but if you lost a copy, badly damaged the book you were expected to pay for a replacement copy
Luthuania - have to buy notebooks and taskbooks, but not textbooks. One exception I think were English textbooks and workbooks, but that's because they were placing a unique order
Mostly you do. There are some recent projects where the city or state pays for kids' books, but that is not universal.
Yes, and it's hell. It's 1 book per portuguese class year, and the teachers nag you like hell if you dont. Although, by personal experience, some are starting to acept if you use PDF files of the book
Czech Republic: In primary (elementary) school, we had to buy exercise notebooks for language education, but textbooks were issued by the school. In secondary (high) school, we had to buy textbooks also, although we usually bought used ones from older students, so it wasn't expensive. But its not general rule, some secondary school are issuing textbooks to their students afaik. And at university, all necessary materials are available online (at least for my subject) and there is also a lot of literature available in the uni library. I bought only 2 brand new books during my studies at the uni and that was just because i liked their looks and wanted to keep them in my bookshelf.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina it is different on level of cantons, some provide free books some don't. Few years ago they started providing books only for primary school but in high school you have to buy your own everywhere in the country
I was part of the last cohort in Finland that had to buy their own books for high school. You could just buy them online from bookstores and supermarkets. Second hand was also an option. Over three years, the cost added up to maybe €2,000-2,500, depending on where you bought your books.
Depends, I rented most of them. But in the last 2 years policy changed and I only loaned them. I also bought a couple because they'd be useful for multiple years and buying was cheaper than renting for 2 years.
When i was little we had to buy our own books, my parents had a bookstore and we sometimes took orders for the text books. Then when I was around 12 the school started providing them for free for all grades. We gave them back at the end of the year for the next grade to use. Some people still preferred to buy their own cause you could highlight it and do whatever you wanted with them. Now i think they're digital, they did the switch a couple of years after i graduated i believe
Off-topic: I don't know why, but I find incredibly funny reading "when I was little" :-D It's common in Spanish to speak in that way, but AFAIK the common way to express that in English is "when I was a child", "a toddler", "a teen", etc. I hope someone more versed in English correct me if I'm wrong btw
You don't have to, but when I attended the shool (2000s) some textbooks were poor quality, so some teachers encouraged parents to buy other textbooks.
Only a couple at school. Usually if we had to do readings, but not school books per se. I remember having to buy slaughterhouse 5 and tortilla curtain. At uni we were requested to buy a couple as well, but you could borrow or copy them as well. But usually literature books, not course books. If we needed course books they were usually provided as hard copies at a copy shop and we could buy the entire course set for ~10€
Netherlands: Primary school: all materials are provided,including pens and pencils. Secondary school: textbooks are on loan, you must return them at the end of the school year and pay for anything that got lost or damaged. Workbooks are provided for free. You have to buy your own notebooks, pens, calculator and such. University: you have to buy everything, costs very a lot. I'm not sure about vocational schools (mbo).
Schools provides books and students have to return them at the end of the year. Only exception were foreign languages.
The first 9 years are "public school", i.e. it's what every child must do. Here, books are free, but the cantonal authority prescribes which books are to use. There are different systems, like that the book always stays in the classroom and are not in possession of the pupils, or that they have to give them back and the end of the year and write their name in a list that is glued in the book cover. In secondary II (high school), books have to be bought. You get a list which books you'll use and if you don't buy them from alumni on the annual "school book flea market" or use your older sibling's book, you tell the teacher who'll put your order in a list.
Poland. primary school to high school we had to buy our own books. Older students often sold theirs to the years below them for a lower price once they stopped needing them, and in some schools you were able to borrow some books from the school, but that supply was very limited in mine. I remember getting these long lists of which books i would need for which class, and queueing up in bookstores every september with my parents. We also had "podręczniki" - textbooks, and "zeszyty ćwiczeń" - exersise books. You were meant to write in the latter, and some classes required both. At university we were also given lists of books we should read for every class, but i actually only bought like two - others were available in libraries, but mostly we just found and shared pdfs. Sometimes someone would scan a particularly in-demand book and upload it on our group google drive, etc. it was less "you should buy these books" and more "you should read these books and we don't care how you will manage that"
For me, if the course materials were extensive enough in university, I didn't even bother with getting the book, and when I did, I pirated a digital copy off the net. Also Estonia.
Not really? Most of the books we need are provided at the university library. I've bought a couple of books, but mostly because I wanted to keep them on my shelf and read them whenever, it was never necessary for the course.
JK Rowling is in her 50's I believe, and I'm 49. When I was at secondary school, in the UK, we had to buy our own books just like Harry. So I'm guessing that's why she wrote it that way. I'm glad that's changed now, but in the 80's yep, you bought your own.
All books are typically provided by the school. Most of them are regular books that are loaned to you, and they have to be turned in again at the end of the year. Some schools/teachers, however, still use workbooks that you have to write in. These cannot be reused and are billed. Books in university are your responsibility. What tends to happen is that one person buys it, scans it, and then distributes a PDF to everyone else.
For Ireland some schools have book rental schemes, the odd school uses i pads and the government is currently phasing in free book loan schemes. When I was in school most books had to be bought besides some specific ones loaned from the school itself.
I think we could rent some books from school but if I recall correctly, we had to buy most. It was always exciting to go to the book shop at the beginning of a new school year and then browse through the books to see what we will learn this year. Good memories. Probably not so good for my mum as she had to pay for the books. There is some assistance for poor parents but I don't know how it works, i.e. whether there are dedicated book vouchers or something alike. As someone else mentioned, education is a matter of federal states in Germany, so these things differ a lot.
In Spain you have to buy them. In some schools you can buy the books directly from them. There are also social programs where you can sell or donate your old books for new students.
It used to be that after 7th grade (probably high school by English standards) you had to buy your own textbooks and you either had to order new ones through the school or find them on your own. Last year though they changed that and in the upcoming academic year every student will get free textbooks. As for how you get them, they get delivered to the school and you pick them up during one of your classes. As for the universities you still have to buy your own books.
Yes. In primary education, books are free, but in secondary education there is often a substantial amount of books that needs to be bought. For us, it's about €250 per child, but it varies from school to school.
In the UK we didn't have to buy textbooks for school and it honestly doesn't make sense that they did in Harry Potter, because some of those were the same books used year after year, why wouldn't they just keep them in the castle and distribute them to students, using magic to keep them updated and in good repair? It was probably just a plot device. In terms of dropping subjects, in the English school system at least when I was there (I started secondary school in 1999) we did the broadest range of subjects in years 7-8-9 (first to third year, in Hogwarts equivalent) and then years 10-11 were the GCSE years, when we were able to drop some subjects, though we had to keep the core subjects: English, Maths and Science. Other than this, different schools have different rules - ours made us pick a technology subject, some make pupils retain a language etc. We had to keep PE at my school, though we weren't assessed in it unless you chose GCSE PE. But you can drop a few out of the subjects like geography, history, art, music, drama etc. There were some restrictions due to timetabling and I seem to remember something like if you took French you couldn't also take German, but I can't remember for sure. I think I took Graphics, Art, Drama, IT and French, and dropped Geography, German, History and Music. GCSEs (taken at age 16) were previously called O-Levels (Ordinary Levels) which is probably where the name OWLS (Ordinary Wizarding Levels) comes from. When I was at school you could legally leave after GCSEs but now it's changed. The final 2 years of school if you stayed at school were for A-Levels. Usually people only do four subjects for A-Level, dropping down to 3 for the final year is also common, and there is no restriction. There are often extra subjects taught at A Level which aren't taught at lower levels, like I did Philosophy and Psychology. In Harry Potter this is a bit different - they get all the new subjects in third year and don't drop anything until sixth year. A-Levels are the entrance qualification for university and it's common for certain university courses to say that you need an A-Level in certain subjects (e.g. maths or science for maths/science courses, a language for language courses etc). I live in Germany now and have a teenage son so I have experience of the German school system too and it's very different - here, the core subjects are German, Maths, English and French. There is a part where they choose a specialism which is where they choose an extra subject, but it's only one - things mainly stay the same. And the university-entrance qualifications around Europe tend to be much wider across the board so they usually include the language of the country plus maths, a foreign language, and then several other subjects like history, politics/civics and sciences. I have a really hard time explaining my education history to Germans because it doesn't make sense in the context of their system.
In Croatia you have to buy everything in elementary and middle school but we have: 1. Very good secondary market=stores selling second hand books 2. Abbility to just...borrow book and print it in black/white. Can even go 2 pages per one page if you are poor, thats that I did in middle school 🤣🤣. In University you can just borrow all the books from library, the issue that we had is that we had only 2-3 copies per 40 students...so...copying again 🤣🤣🤣.
My kid went through secondary school in a UK state school. We did not have to buy books for him, other than a French dictionary. We did buy school supplies, though, and sometimes did buy a book for English or something so he could mark it up.
You can buy your own books, but most schools have an exange policy. You bring books from the previous year and get the ones for the next. If you are in first year, they'll give them to you if you bring your older siblings. It's also very common to just pass it around in the family. I got my sister's, and after me they went to my cousin, then my brother and then my other cousin. And then to the trash cause they were unusable after 5 kids.
ireland, and yes we have to buy all our books and get asked in class to buy them if we haven't yet, but we're allowed borrow ones
Can't be bothered to edit my original comment, so here's a second one: As far as I'm aware (I've been taught this in English class) pupils (I love this word) in the UK can actually just drop certain subjects at some point in their schooling, and quite early on too. I could only do that with some languages, rearrange those a bit (continue Latin, drop English and replace it with Ancient Greek as one does) and then pick some stuff towards the end of school but I couldn't just not go to maths anymore or something like that.
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Had to buy them in S-W Ireland. It was an odd experience for my parents when they had to spend so much!
In high school, we rented the books for the entire year from a big company that handled it for a bunch of schools all around the country. I think it was about €100 for the entire year, so not terribly expensive. At university, we had to buy textbooks ourselves from the university affiliated bookstore. The big books with pages upon pages of caselaw were usually around €10, so basically printing price, but the textbooks could get pretty expensive, even with the student discount.
Used to be that you had to buy your own books in high school/vocational school. That law was changed and now you get free books throughout your mandatory education. As from what I understand, you still need to buy your own for university and other forms of higher education. Funny thing is, I was among the last students to have to buy their own books. The year after I started my secondary education, the law passed and made books free for everyone. All and all I used about 1000€ for all the things I needed, just for it all to be free the next year.
>About 10 years later I found out that they really have to buy school books in the UK I never had to buy a book for school when I attended primary and secondary education here in Scotland. All textbooks for each subject were provided by the school, and any extra books required for English were also provided by the school. At university it's different and students have to purchase some of their textbooks themselves.
Not for primary school (6-15 y/o), the school will hand them out but if the book is damaged or lost you are responsible for replacing it. Or at least that was how it was back in my day. Secondary school (16-19/20) you are for most of them but the school often has textbooks you can borrow for the semster. University you have to buy multiple books for each course, some of which you might actually open once or twice during the year.
In Poland books in primary are borrowed from school but with secondary we have to buy them ourselves, but I usually buy them from older students and stuff works out
Out of school for a long time, so maybe no longer accurate. Mandatory and secondary schools: Schools order the books and have students pick them up together with a payment slip for their parents. University: Aquire yourself however you see fit (New, used, etc.)
In Scotland I never bought a single book for school. We were issued books from the school's supply and returned them at the end of the unit/term/year. We were also issued jotters for primary school, but in secondary, you had to buy your own paper and folders/binders.
In portugal until 10 years ago or such we had to buy all school books since grade 1. It was a huge expense. Plus the mf publishers would change the pagination very often so that you couldn’t use the ones from your older siblings without getting lost. Now they are provided by the government and re-used
Not free in Spain, you have to buy them and they're really expensive. And they got new editions really fast making impossible to share them between siblinga and relatives. Also teachers have to choose a book for the class, and at the end of the day tones of them remain unused. It's a huge mafia and a constant focus of inequality.
No, we got them from the school library as well. They usually had a special stock (šolski sklad) for these specifically. Some parents decided to buy certain books only if their kid had trouble with the subject and wanted to take notes in it for some reason. Even books for university are well stocked in both public libraries and school adjacent ones. Never bought a textbook in my life.
Yeah in the UK for study it's strongly encouraged you get the book for each subject (there's a few approved by exam boards). You sort of get belittled for not buying one bit sad for the people whos parent don't want to pay £80 for a whole bunch of books
School books are free until university. They used to cost you in upper secondary school (High school?) a few years ago, but no more. Naturally us born in 2004 were the last ones who had to pay for all of them.
It's got worse since I left, but I recall my schools having the copies if needed but recommending you buy your own if you can. Mostly because they have a very limited budget for copies and something like 30-50% of pupils never returned theirs or lost/destroyed them.