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No OLPCs for Indian Schoolchildren
Sensing more sinister goings on, reader bstadil calls the decision the result of an "MS counter move":In India, there are basically two kinds of schools — the high tuition, exclusive schools run by Christian Convents or rich, privately funded educational institutions, and the 'municipal' schools run by the government.
Most children that go to the former category of schools come from middle class/upper class families and already have access to computers at home.
Presumably, the OLPC program is for the second type of schools, which mostly children who live close to or below the poverty line attend. Most of these schools will have teachers who have never used computers, and who are likely to resent any drastic technological change such as computers in the classroom.
So, along with an OLPC program, the government would have to run a massive teacher-education program to teach the use of these computers in the classroom — not to mention overhauling the coursework so that it makes effective use of these machines.
In addition, the government would have to put in place infrastructure to service and repair these laptops at affordable prices throughout India.
All of this to be done in a country of more than a billion people speaking hundreds of known languages and dialects.
When you think of these factors, those laptops are going to cost way more than the $100 MIT claims.
I could go on and on about the fallacies of this scheme, but clearly, it would be crazy for India to adopt it at this point in time.
Gates has been courting India for quite a while. This move is a political move nothing to do with the merits of the program.Reader eln takes the Ministry's objections at closer to face value, writingI really don't care about India but would love to see Bangladesh adopt the OLPC program. They have thanks to Yusun and his Microloan program almost eradicated poverty so they seem to be a more innovative people. Remember 10- 15 years ago you almost always heard of about the plight of Bangladesh? Heard anything lately? I rest my case.
While the OLPC program may have suffered a setback in India, reader Gord says it'sAlso, the concern about health effects may seem silly, but there have been plenty of cases where things that were relatively harmless for adults turn out to have adverse effects on still-developing children. Given this, and given that these children would presumably be using these laptops for many hours a day, asking for studies on this does not seem unreasonable.
Worth pointing out that according to this brief article, Nigeria has ordered 1 million of these laptops at $100 a throw.Nigeria's government isn't the only one who holds out hope for the benefit of a cheap, low-powered but durable computer. Danzigism is one of several readers who thinks that the OLPC hardware has a brighter future if it was made available on a larger scale:
I think they just need to market the damn things.. i'd gladly pay $150-200 for one, for my kid — just manufacture them damnit! I think the idea is great to give kids these things and all, but I'd rather buy the kids tons of books and put the money into providing them a good education, with good teachers and a nice working environment.Reader theCat defends computer-per-pupil programs, and says that "[s]everal experiments in the U.S." have resulted in "general[ly] positive results," writing
Reader Bastian responds to that, writingI think anyone who says "feed them first, then give them a computer" misses the point that if all you do is ever feed people and then move on, that's as far as they get. I get the impression that while most people living in poverty will happily accept a meal, they will likewise fight hard and loudly to better their condition even at the risk of someone going without a meal in the process. You don't have to be a rich Western geek to understand that filling your belly today doesn't guarantee a full belly tomorrow, and food aid is notorious for drying up once a current crisis is abated.
Reality Master 101 asks for a link to positive results mentioned by theCat, writingAs a former student of a school with a one-student-one-computer program, I'd like to point out that I'm not convinced by the positive results people are reporting. When you spend God-only-knows-how-much-money and muck around with kids' educations with a program like this, admitting you screwed up is just about the dumbest thing a person could possibly do. I can't speak for anyone else, but my high school really screwed up with that idea. That didn't stop the administrators from bragging and bragging and bragging as if these laptops had turned everyone into a genius child. (Rather than just being one more distraction.)
... If we want to fix up our schools, we should start by reviewing our crufty old educational plan that hasn't been revised for decades and basically ignores all major research on how people learn. Once we have a new plan, we can go about figuring out how to implement it. I'm sure that computers will be the best way to implement some details of the plan, but they should be used only for those things, and if it turns out that there's a better way to do something else (lectures, for example, are almost guaranteed to suck if PowerPoint is involved), then they should be avoided.
But stuff like the OLPC program seem to work from the assumption that computers are this magic bullet that will instantly improve education — through some hand-wavy magic computron field, maybe?
Reader loquacious d offers the disclaimer that he is "currently contracting with several Alaskan organizations in the area of education technology," along with a defense of encouraging computers in schools:I've only seen studies that show how overall useless, if not negative, computers are in the classroom, especially when you give them to students. They get broken easily, they're generally used in non-educational ways, and they're a big distraction. I doubt you can find some clear, unambiguous gains for students with laptops.
In a separate thread, reader Angst Badger was broadly skeptical of the educational value of computers in the classroom, but did spot a few exceptions:One neat thing about technology in schools is that it lets you do completely new kinds of schoolwork. A new kind of project that many of my English-teaching acquaintances are starting to like is the fake-novel-movie-adaptation-trailer, or artsy-literature-inspired-music-video. Going outside the bounds of the traditional two-page book report or reading journal really helps students think differently and more deeply about the subject (especially for students not compatible with the text-based U.S. school system). Film also really lends itself to literary tropes like symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. This kind of thinking is just not possible (or at least very difficult) without prevalent access to technology. I've heard anecdotally that music students love GarageBand for recording state honor band/choir audition tapes, or just for practicing in general (recording yourself is notoriously one of the best ways to figure out all the myriad ways you suck). And the sheer amount of good information and media available on the internet is rapidly rivaling even the best-equipped public school libraries.
Obviously the $100 laptop isn't going to be a great video editing machine (though, if you can do it on an Amiga [wikipedia.org]...), but even the basic functions of word processing and Internet capability (the Wikipedia, for chrissake! how great would the world be if everyone had the Wikipedia?) have the capability to dramatically improve the baseline quality of education for developing populations.
Readers debated at length the difference between the use of laptops in education in poor countries compared to rich ones; one argument, as phrased by reader xzvf, is that Industrial Countries have Textbooks:To be fair, while I was working for a school district, I saw some really creative uses of computers, but these were a) the exception, and b) still not very good uses of money compared to other things that it could have been spent on.)
The other problem that is not often considered at the outset is the maintenance cost. A school district full of computers needs a full-time support staff, which takes away money that could have gone to hiring new teachers and reducing class sizes, and it also requires regular replacement. One-third of the IT budget for the district I worked in was devoted to replacing obsolete machines.
Surprisingly, the best use I saw for computers was reducing the amount of time it took teachers and staff to take attendance and collate grades. That actually did some good because teachers had more time to teach.
Industrial countries have and can pay for nearly new textbooks to give to each child. Most parents in industrialized countries have computers their children can use. OLPC replaces books and gives the entire family access to information.To another reader's question about "the pedagogical use for notebooks in class," twofidyKidd jokingly offered "two words": Sex Ed.
That, according to Capt'n Hector, isn't funny.
Not funny. Insightful. Do you know how much ignorance there is in developing nations about STDs, birth control, pregnancy, etc?To that, Jherek Carnelian says
Many comments focused on the seeming incongruity of providing high-technology in the form of laptop computers rather than what is conventionally described as "humanitarian aid" to countries plagued by more immediate problems, such as extreme poverty. StefanJ says these are not mutually exclusive:Which may be one of the reasons countries reject these laptops. Regressive ideologies, particularly the ones that think women are only good for babies tend to reject that kind of knowledge.
There is no reason not to simultaneously provide medical aid, food aid, aid to repair infrastructure, and etcetera, and computers. That is a phony dichotomy.Reader Senzei also chides as simplistic the argument that computers aren't appropriate until more basic issues are resolved:One of the big failings of aid and development programs in the past has been a lack of appropriateness; clueless big projects which do little or nothing to help.
It is possible that the One-Laptop-Per-Child project is one of these clueless projects. It could, however, end up as a sort of force multiplier, a source of intelligence (in the "information" sense of the word) and a form of feedback that would let aid organizations know what is really needed and where.
Yep, there are a lot of people with really basic needs. Too bad there are not more educated members of society with the ability to communicate those needs to each other and organize some aid. It would be awesome if someone could help give an education boost to those countries that are above starvation but not yet affluent enough to really provide a lot of help. Oh wait...pherthyl addresses one of the , writing
The side effect of feeding the hungry is that it effectively destroys their entire local food production business. The farmers who previously supported themselves selling food can't compete with free and are suddenly themselves dependent on handouts to survive.Reader Whiney Mac Fanboy distinguishes good aid from bad, writingDo some reading on how the flood of donated clothes from the western world destroyed the textile industry in many areas of Africa. Handouts are a terrible long term solution.
Finally, Lemmy Caution offers a note of caution that probably applies to any computers-in-classrooms project, but in particular ones along the lines of the OLPC project, which aim to increase educational opportunities by spreading technology through charitable and other low-cost measures to the developing world:Depends on how its done. Aid agencies such as Oxfam have recognised this for a while — and rather than importing food to troubled areas, try to either give locals money to buy food or buy from local farmers.
Government agencies don't particularly like that however, as they'd rather spend their aid budget within their own country, helping their own farmers (its amazing how much of the average first-world nation's "aid" budget will be spent within that country).
[N]ot all markets work the same: housing is sui generis (particularly when it is land and location that is the cost-driver.)Also, education is not a panacea. You can over-educate a population past its economic opportunities and create a variety of problems, from the wide-scale loss of the best-and-brightest to other countries, to a population of resentful, overeducated people who are only able to find jobs in the lower ranks of the agricultural and industrial sectors (this is much of what happened in parts of Latin America -- the Sendero Luminoso of Peru was largely officered by a generation of well-educated poor youth who found no job opportunities awaiting for them after their much-vaunted education was finished.)
England did not have the most widely educated population back when it was the richest, most powerful nation in the world. I think you might find the correlation between education and prosperity, historically, to have a number of suprises.
Many thanks to all the readers who took part in the discussion, in particular those whose comments are quoted above.
How about food, shelter, and medicine for every child?
http://religiousfreaks.com/...a help-desk job for every child! Wait, they have that already!
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
Put aside that they're not going to be making these at the $100 point for the foreseeable ever...
So you idiots think that India isn't ordering these under pressure from Microsoft, but Nigeria, where the son of the president/dictator works for Microsoft, *is* ordering a million of them?
Why not save a billion or more and load Linux w. OpenOffice? Say it was only $250 per PC to load with OS and Office, thats only 4 million PCs to spend a billion and you haven't got the hardware yet.
Something I waited to see if it got mentioned last time around but I never saw it come up was this:
If there is an existing infrastructure for education, buildings, teachers, books, pencils, paper, etc. then it might make more sense to focus on those traditional things rather than blindly say that computers in the classroom are a good thing and throw money at them.
However, the target for these $100 laptops are places where there is no infrastructure, no books, no classrooms, nothing. Now when starting from scratch like that I think you get more benefit from every child having a laptop right off the bat than from trying to build up the more traditional type of educational system like we have in more developed contries.
It is sort of like saying that countries should have to build out traditional analog phone line systems rather than start out with cell phone systems which are so much less physical infrastructure intensive. That doesn't make sense, why force them to build the type of thing we are moving away from just for the sake of making them do it they way we did.
Also, I haven't heard anyone mention what I read was one of the more off beat benefits of the $100 laptops:
The provided light for the whole hut at night. I am not joking, when asking for feed back from the parents of children who were testing the idea, the parents said they thought it was great because it was by far the brightest light they had at night.
Wax on, wax off baby!
Uh, yeah. India is run by a regressive ideology that restricts access to computers and the Internet in order to suppress feminism. You guys are obsessed with the prospect of losing your jobs to them, but as soon as they're insufficiently besotted with Linux (or insufficiently anti-Microsoft), they're Talibanistic Luddite savages.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
yeah, clean water for every child is more important and urgent than a laptop. Any surprise?
I'm personally unconvinced about the whole idea of OLPC. However, I hope the project succeeds for completely unrelated reasons. OLPC is prompting a whole raft of work aimed at slimming down the Linux userland, in order to make it usable on the modest hardware available. That can only be a good thing, given the recent trend towards bloat.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Dir sir,
Firstly I must solicit your confidence in this matter. Let me introduce my self I am Tijani Yusufo credit officer for the Union Bank of Nigeria
CRANK CRANK CRANK CRANK
I need to transfer a large sum of money out of my country to a foreign account requiring maximum confidence
CRANK CRANK CRANK CRANK
Here is my proposition....
My Mom was a public school teacher for 13 years and very quickly discovered that the problem with our educational system was not the lack of technology. As a math teacher, she saw that many students relied on their (graphing) calculators to do even simple arithmetic as a result. The main problems she saw in low income parts of the county were lack of parental involvement, peer pressure not to do well in school (particularly when she taught poorer students), and a lack of ambition or motivation. When she taught in a higher income part of the county, she felt that many parents would push too hard for their kids to be honors classes, where they performed poorly and diminished the quality of education for other students.
In short, the problems afflicting the education system, in the U.S. at least, are social not technological. Presumably, elsewhere in the world, this is the case, as well.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Here in America we may look down on that decision, but our schools have fallen apart precisely because we have allowed so many different distractions from the "3 Rs." I applaud the Indian schools for rejecting this because it is a decent idea in theory, but not for those who are already getting left behind by badly staffed and equipped public schools. What India needs is a competitive market for education, not cheap laptops.
What the poor countries really need are:
1) Good government that is limited, efficient and run by ethical people with enlightened liberal (as in Locke, not Marx) attitudes toward individuals and their worth.
2) Investment into their infrastructure to enable higher and longer quality of life.
3) Populations with a good, liberal education that isn't just focused on math and science.
I hate backslash
Danzigism is one of several readers who thinks that the OLPC hardware has a brighter future if it was made available on a larger scale:
I think they just need to market the damn things.. i'd gladly pay $150-200 for one, for my kid -- just manufacture them damnit! I think the idea is great to give kids these things and all, but I'd rather buy the kids tons of books and put the money into providing them a good education, with good teachers and a nice working environment.
The only problem with that is you'd get a turnaround market where people in the 3rd world countries start selling their $100 laptops for more than $100.
Hell, knowing how corrupt countries like Nigeria are, if they knew they could get $150 for those laptops, someone would definitely start siphoning off part of the shipments & turning it around for cash.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And who would buy one from the Nigerian children?
If:
A) Every children got one for free at school
B) It's almost useless unless you're a children, or a geek
Take a look at the machine specs... Sure, if it was an average laptop, able to run Windows, MSOffice and all sort pirated applications and games some people would buy it from the children, but given the laptop specs and software it seems very unlikely.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
$100 a PC is a fortune in comparison to the amount that would be needed to ensure basic literacy.
d ucation
India actually has a giangantic problem with basic literacy. Even though the country produces so many engineers and doctors, many of its people cannot read. If India could get the money to buy the laptops it would be better spent on making 1st-5th grade education universal. And at least by estimates from the 1990s, the price would be quite similar, with the five years paper and pencil education being cheaper.
(from a friend in a discussion the other day)
http://www.deeshaa.org/who-actually-paid-for-my-e
http://www.ashanet.org/stats/PROBE.html
...could be accomplished by abolishing the federal department of education. It isn't needed at all, it's a huge money pit (along with several other federal agencies)that uses a ton of the cash just to run their own bureaucracy, then engages in social engineering to dole out part of the money back to the states. It is a relatively historically recent invention, and we could just call it a flawed experiment and move on.
As to unions and management, etc, union workers only do what management tells them to do. Look at Detroit-is it the unions fault that GM and Ford were so slow out of the blocks to get decent built affordable high mileage per gallon vehicles out there? Nope. Why didn't they come out with hybrids first? And etc. Folks bash unions for management/stock holders decisions all the time. Now I have been in a couple of unions and will be the first to say there are a lot of problems, but designing and trying to market products that are over priced, under built, and always 5 years behind the trends with a fixation on bling and curb feelers and fins is not the unions fault-ever. Yet-they get the blame all the time. Doesn't compute. Of course unions want the best possible deal they can get vis a vis pay, etc, that' the job of the union, project a united front for negotiations. Management in industry does this as well, they just aren't called unions, they are called country club golf courses with the good ole boy skull and bones networking, and industry associations.
In the local schools, a lot of problems could be avoided if parents just took a more pro active role in the local school board and in local politics with property taxes, etc.. Snooze ya lose there. People need to prioritize better. That's why I see home schooling taking off so much, some people realise quite readily there isn't much to do with bucking the entire system from the feds on down, so they just suck it up and homeschool if they really care. I know if I was in that situation now, trying to put small children through school, they would be home schooled for the most part.
The basic reality is that quality of tools does not have a tight correlation with quality of education.
Higer quality tools can enable higer quality education, but only if you have quality educators. A great teacher with Paper/Pencil/Chalkboard/Books will outperform a mediocre teacher with a $30,000 multimedia classroom.
Without a quality digital textbook, the OLPC is just an over-priced paper-weight. Now, if a quality piece of educational material is created for the OLPC, then we can help teachers with better tools. But nothing here is replacing kinesthetic learning, the OLPC is not a good substitute for a little real-world experimentation.
Right now, the OLPC is just an expensive version of Paper/Pencil/Books. Until we have quality educational software, until the teacher can use the OLPC to improve feedback, customize learning and decrease learning time, this thing is just a toy.
Personally I'm amazed that anyone with the will to create such a tool as the OLPC did not have the foresight to incorporate curriculum and learning materials. We have a giant hammer with no nails and no lumber, some plan.
One of the benefits of the cheap laptop is that textbooks are cheaper and easier to distribute, thus saving enough money to pay for the laptops. Plus you get up to date texts, and in your own language, especially if you write them yourself, which would mean no royalties from your foreign currency reserve. And the kids can take them home with them easier than lugging pounds of real books.
Infuriate left and right
I'm really getting tired of people who have no background in education, nor any training in being an educator ranting about the age old methods used in schools, how modern research is ignored, and how teachers suck. There are plenty of bad eggs in every field, but education does change, and the field does move forward. One of the things that most new teachers are trained in is Howard Gardners "Multiple Intelligence Theory" which directly deals with how people learn, and how differantly differant people learn. Modern degree programs for education majors not only cover this, but they try to teach new teachers methods that they can use to provide for the various learning styles that children have. A great many school districts are updating their curiculums to better suit the students needs, taking into account that children learn in differant ways and doing as much accomidation as possible. Currently the primary place you will see these types of actions is in K-8. High schools still teach using traditional methods though some high schools are changing. There are other difficulties with high schools and there is other research that describes why traditional methods work well for children of high school age.
Multiple Intelligence Theory is just one of many new ideas that are being actively used to create curriculum and lesson plans in schools in the U.S. I would recommend that the original commentor read up on it before assuming he knows more than the educators who are trained specifically to educate. I'm pretty sure the technical folks here on slashdot get irritated when people with no knowledge or education act like they know more than they do, we should give educators and those in other fields the same courtesy and respect that we want.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm
Indian giver!
I don't think it should be the Project's job to write the software themselves.
They should provide guidance, SDKs, maybe even funding, but the software and materials should be home grown.
For one thing, local educators will best know what their students need.
For another, this is a chance to employ the local talent.
Imagine if Nigeria and/or some NGOs started employing all those computer-literate kids who are sending out 409 letters to instead do some useful coding!
Even if it were clearer than it is that providing laptops has educational advantages over not providing laptops, it still would not be clear that this would be the most effective investment of India's money. It's one thing to ask whether a well-off community in the US should provide laptops and quite another to ask the same question in India. Given limited resources, I don't find it at all difficult to believe that the rational decision in India is to invest in teachers and teacher training, textbooks, and schoolbuildings, or in school lunches and breakfasts, health care for children (its hard to learn if you're sick), adult literacy programs (in addition to other benefits, literate parents are a boon to a child's education), economic assistance to poor families so that their children don't need to work and can attend school, and so forth.
There's another issue here that I don't think anyone has mentioned. One of the stated purposes of this project is to enable kids to learn without teachers. Now, I'm all for kids learning independently, and indeed did a lot of that myself, but a program based on learning independently of teachers is likely to fail in a culture that views learning from teachers as really important, which I believe to be the case in India. There are no doubt /. readers who can tell me whether I am right or wrong about this. If parents think that it is important to learn from a teacher, they are not going to encourage their kids to use the laptops, and the society as a whole may not be supportive and may not develop materials for the kids to use. The little peasant kids that Negroponte would like to reach aren't going to study Math World and Wikipedia and the like: they're going to need materials appropriate to their age and cultural background written in their own languages. Where is all that going to come from?
The August 2006 issue of Wired mentions this $100 laptop project The Laptop Crusade. With all of the discussion about the pros and cons of giving technology to developing countries, isn't it a huge value to give these countries an option to use the technology as they see fit for their students? Even at the current low prices of PCs, they are still out of the range of these countries. This new laptop designed by Yves takes into account the high cost of repairs and is designed to be much more resiliant than traditional laptops, making them much more affordable to maintain.
you state many people don't know how to read. this is true. why? they know how to eat, right? why did they learn to eat and not read?
;-)
the incentive was too great to ignore.
i do not think my son will have a problem reading b/c he desperately wants to be able to better understand the computer. yeah, he likes playing games on it now. but i bet you he knows what "start" is.
i guess what i'm saying is that giving kids access to computers will cause them to *want* to read, therefore, they will be more likely to read.
the incentive goes up. not as much as eating, but you get the gist.
i don't think they ever deliver a $100 laptop - that's marketing / hype nonsense. nor do i think 1 laptop per child is a good use of the program - to start, anyway.
this administrator complaining about teaching teachers how to use computers is silly. *all* teachers should know technology and, darn it, the school system should teach them!
i'm thinking this guy is enveloped in that caste nonsense and doesn't want poor, low caste people moving up - so he goes out of his way to keep them dumb.
what he should do is get the laptops for his classrooms - 1 or 2 per. the teach can hang around and learn new skills and students can use them, too. if it works - order more.
you don't even have to order them for all schools - run a stupid pilot program with 10 classrooms first. see what works and move forward.
but that makes sense, so it won't happen.
Nice to see I'm not the only one bothered by what passes for insightful around here. Seriously has the poster even been exposed to these "repressive ideologies"? Or did he just hear it on some web site, or the TV? And then makes a majour leap of logic that that's why these laptops are being rejected. Maybe Martha Stewart should get him to pick stocks for her? Mr "inside scoop" and all.
The academic in the university produces a theory and a textbook, a new way of teaching math, but engagement with parents and teachers is superficial at best.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the caste system still deeply ingrained in modern Indian society. That may be (at least at subconscious levels) partially to blame.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
"Sex education in schools seems to be a taboo in USA, unless you count the religious right preaching of "no sex before marriage" as education."
Right, because as everyone knows. Semen and STDS are transmitted right through clothing. The odds go down when you take all your clothes off, and get lathered up for a couple rounds of heavy breathing, and "will you respect me in the morning?"
After spending time in the higher educational system in India, I think that the Govt. of India is making a mistake. While making sure that food, clothing, potable water should be made available, in a country like India, the political reality is that these services are intentionally not provided. The impovershed are the tools of political parties and bosses that benefit from the lack of education, literacy and common sense among the masses. The masses are reduced to only understanding emotional rhetoric. They are given sachets of foot, a fifth of quarter of alcohol and a movie ticket to vote for a particular candidate. By providing computers for poor children, there is a good chance that the natural curiosity of these children can be harnessed and polished. Their parents are condemned to the working class and the future of these poor children is bleak at best. By not provided these OLPCs, the Indian government propagates the widening of the digital divide. By providing computers and efficient networking, children in the lower socioeconomic strata can virtually 'leapfrog' forward in terms of their ability to learn. By creating a more educated electorate will help the country, but hurt the current political bosses. Add information technology to the list of have not's (in addition to potable water, food, clothing, education, hope...). I welcome feedback in a civil debate...
I wonder how many of these laptops will end up being used by adults for the family business? This may not be a bad thing. The parent gives the child a task of finding out how this laptop can help them in their business, or how the laptop can help them start a new business. The parent and the child will learn something about using computers and the family income will rise.
I'm very surprised no one has mentioned what would really happen with these laptops. First no household on the poverty line in India is going to spend 1/4 of their annual income buying a laptop for a child to tote around, beat-up and lose or break. I know I wouldn't spend that much of my annual income for something so easily destroyed. So the government could order a bunch of them, and hand them out to the students for free or steep discount. So then what happens? Why they take them home and sell them on the street for $100, $200, maybe more. Why not make half a years income in a couple of hours. These are very large numbers of people struggling to meet the needs of basic survival. If I can sell something I got for free and cover half my families food bill for a year I know what I'm doing with the thing. I'll just tell the school I lost it and they can issue me a new one. If they bill me for it or tell me I don't get another, I can just ignore the bill or fall behind in class. India isn't going to be changing its curriculum to accomodate these new laptops so I can still learn the core material. These things will move fast. They'll end up on the street vendors stalls overnight. I don't think people are really getting the scope of the issues of poverty in India. 100s of millions of children live in abject poverty in India. They couldn't make these things fast enough to reach significant numbers of them. So the schools can't modify the curriculum to require the kids to use them. So they could only offer them in special classes for those kids who do have them. So the families will sell them and the kids will stay in the ordinary classes. Those schools where the children can afford to keep the laptops would already have computers in the home since they can be bought for $200 already. Not to mention how easy these things are going to be to steal on a regular basis.
As a proud "old boy" of a government-run, "public" school, I have to strongly disagree. There are very good schools in the governmental sphere as well, just that they don't advertise that heavily in the local papers.
More than mere navel gazing.
However, the target for these $100 laptops are places where there is no infrastructure, no books, no classrooms, nothing. Now when starting from scratch like that I think you get more benefit from every child having a laptop right off the bat than from trying to build up the more traditional type of educational system like we have in more developed contries.
You have made a great display of ignorance. $100 is the cost of laptop alone. Add to that the cost of training teachers to use a laptop with sufficient skill. Plus the cost of techincal support. Plus the hardware cost of repair and replacement in a tropical, poverty-stricken and dust-polluted environment. Plus the possibility of theft and so on. The real cost of such a program in will be much more than $100 per child. Plus the cost of electricity (yes, batteries are hard to charge in huts with no power supply). Plus the cost of internet connection. And don't forget India has hundreds of languages. so, do us a favor and ask your MIT buddy to put a laptop in every Massachussett child's lap. Once you can get that done, make sure that state of Mass. becomes the greatest US state in terms of education producing the brightest professionals and teachers in the USA. Then go around preaching how $100 laptops can help the "third world". Preach only what you have practiced.
We are talking about kids learning to read who have no access to ANY physical books, and the cost of getting physical textbooks to them is so prohibitive that they might get one book per school, and that will be a donated book from the first world, inappropriate, out of date, and in a language they can't read, but maybe they will be lucky to have a teacher who can read and translate some of it.
This has nothing to do with novels to read while commuting or lying in a hammock. Thsi has everything to do with kids who have NO book access period.
Infuriate left and right
I came from a school that had a one-laptop-per-child initiative, and *Christ* if it just lead to obscene amounts of distracted students. When you have to sneak a comic book inside your US History text to fuck around in class, only the dedicated few will do so. When fucking around in class, though, becomes as easy and pleasurable as it is having a laptop in front of you, you end up with a classroom environment of mind-shattering counterproductivity. I know I, for one, spent my entire senior year playing online correspondence chess -- and certainly not paying attention.
Though, where this bit of anecdotal evidence fails is this: though I know from pretty-good firsthand experience that the average American student does not want to learn, and will fuck around hard when given a computer, I don't at all know whether the average Indian student, may actually have the drive to take the privelege to learn and make the most of a computer. I'm not going to pretend to have a whit of insight into India's cultural character here.
Either way, though, I really can't see where pen and paper is a worse set of learning tools than is a computer, in the end. Call me a fragile stick-in-the-mud in the path of the Wave of the Future, but ultimately I think it the quality of the teacher and not the gleam of the tool that defines the potential of a given learning situation. So, might not $100 educational subsidies per student yield better results?
$0.02
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Truth is... Its not memorization that makes man great, but the ability to utilize his tools.
I think the role played by memory in intelligence tends to be underestimated. After all, what good are tools if you don't remember how to use them? How else do we know how to speak without memorizing words & their meanings? Or read?
Rote memorization is not sufficient, but it is necessary to a large degree. Most intelligent people I know include a good memory among their attributes (not to mention creativity, tenacity, open-mindedness, ability to focus, ability to think logically as well as illogically when needed, ability to work hard, etc.).
If you observe kids carefully, you'll find that their minds seem to behave like tape recorders. Clearly, memorization is an important part of learning, esp. languages...
I just mention this because remembering the past seems to be a seriously underrated skill here in N. America (Canada & USA). Yet everyone depends on it.
A family member now works for the Gates Foundation. In conversations with her prior to her employment there she mentioned that after the GF gave enormous amounts of money to India for combating disease that many of the government's Linux and Open Source initiatives died almost instantly. The Gates Foundation does a lot of good, but the money comes with strings attached. It is for that reason that I was very sad that Warren Buffett elected to give away his fortune through that organization.
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