Slashdot Mirror
Zuckerberg and Gates-Backed Startup Seeks To Shake Up African Education
theodp writes The WSJ reports an army of teachers wielding Nook tablets and backed by investors including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to bring cheap [$6.50/month], internet-based, private education to millions of the world's poorest children in Africa and Asia. In Kenya, 126,000 students are enrolled at 400+ Bridge International Academies that have sprung up across the country since the company was founded in 2009. Bridge's founders are challenging the long-held assumption that governments rather than companies should lead mass education programs. The Nook tablets are used to deliver lesson plans used by teachers (aka "scripted instruction"), as well as to collect test results from students to monitor their progress."
Hasn't Africa suffered enough from the good old "missionary spirit" and its endless raft of unintended consequences?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Spawn more cheap workers now!
The school I support in Zambia is happy just to get pencils and pens. They have no use for anything electronic.We are working to get them enough electricity to have a light on when it gets dark. Sometimes we in the west have no idea the rudimentary conditions some folks live in.
Scripted "education" will not create the democratizing force that American public education was supposed to be (and largely was until NCLB). You can hardly create people capable of thinking outside the box when all you do is provide them with a box, so to speak. However, that being said, scripted lessons will certainly be a HUGE improvement over the little to no schooling that many African nations have. In the US, we see breakdowns in the effectiveness of education at 4th grade and 8th grade, which require dramatic shifts in pedagogy (compared to previous years) to accommodate. So, I'd say these scripted lessons can probably help developing nations bring their average education level to the 4th grade, which is, again, a HUGE improvement over the rampant illiteracy that likely plague those areas.
If step 1 is not kill all the current warlords and government leaders it will fail.
An uneducated population is a lot easier to control than an educated one, These corrupt and evil leaders that have kept Africa in a constant state of turmoil and fear will not have anything to do with improving the education of the people.
Because if you educate them, they will learn that they are being abused and rise up. 100 men with machine guns are no match for 1,000,000 angry people with rocks and sticks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I wish someone would show interest in failing American education. The feds and unions have destroyed it.
They've had enough sanctimonious colonial meddling. It's oppressive and supremacist to impose European standards on them.
Looking at our own educational systems, both in the US and Europe, I'm not too sure that we're the right one's to show the Africans how to do it properly.
We're so geared towards diplomas that our higher education facilities have turned into diploma printing machines. Whether people learn actual skills or are able to actually use the knowledge that is ground into their heads seems less and less important.
So I'm not really too sure whether we shouldn't just eat a slice of humble pie in that regard. OTOH, perhaps this startup truly will be effective. In that case, I'm all for applying what they'll learn to our own schools.
Just moron - and that's the Anonymous Coward
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Given their track record, I'd trust them as much as the drug dealer in the shady park in my neighborhood (or most probably less).
Well I guess it makes sense, since the point of mass education is to prepare people to WORK, to spend their life contributing to capital...
If you think the people in these areas are backwards, benighted, oppressed, or UNHAPPY because they don't have access to a formal education via eReaders, you are just as racist as the last several centuries of imperialists... this kind of program is meant to get the population used to:
-dealing with, and planning their lives around, money
-consuming and replacing technology
-compacting leisure time into discrete chunks of consumption - what we in the west refer to as "entertainment"
etc.
This program sees these people as one thing, an underexploited source of revenue
Ladies and Gentlemen; the solution is not simply to provide kids with an education. We've got to shake up the constant warfare, dictatorships and starvation.
And there is a solution. It's called commerce.
Ladies and Gentlemen; I present the humble Volkswagen Beetle. The original I mean --the rear-engined, air-cooled one.
The tooling for the car exists in both Brazil and Mexico, where it's no longer made, so that is cheap to aquire. You then need to build a factory, which employs people, and you need to start building the car, which employs people. This builds the economy; which creates other businesses.
People then buy the car, and the car can be exported into other African nations. Furthermore, you stamp out parts for export worldwide, to countries where the car used to be sold, to those who still run them.
The car is perfect for Africa, where roads are not great, and the car is durable, simple, easy to repair, and cheap on gas. Its construction is some African Nation would raise the economy of the entire continent.
And then they can build their own schools instead of needing the money of billionaires.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The average person in a LOT of the countries in Africa makes less than $2 a day, the bulk of which goes to pay for food so they don't starve and they often have to subsistence farm on top of that because $2 doesn't go very far. $6.50 is laughable. They need light, pencils, paper and hell even electricity long before they need a surface tablet.
But it's not like I expected Zuckerberg to get this. He's the quintessential rich guy now that doesn't understand the little people.
the long-term benefit stuff
You saying they are not quite ready for LOL cat pictures yet?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Gates and Zuck want to farm the entire human race for wage slaves. The oligarchs want to pluck the best and brightest from wherever they may be and utilize them.
These countries need fresh water, a reliable food supply and the most rudimentary things for education, eg, paper and pencils. These tools want to throw keyboards at the world hoping to farm out another hidden gem like Ramanujan and pluck them like cheap underpaid fruit.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
It makes my mouth water!
After all, they've done such a bang-up job on education here!
That is all.
Bridge's founders are challenging the long-held assumption that governments rather than companies should lead mass education programs.
It is political and cultural suicide to surrender control of education to outside forces.
There is always a reaction --- slow in coming perhaps ---- but poisonous when it takes full form. You only have to look at the history of OLPC and Common Core in the states to see the truth in that.
It's telling as well, I think, that where the Bridge Academies post its Awards, they are all for entrepreneurship, not education.
Is mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article although his book, and what he found in the poorest, third-word slums, wasn't. What he found was tiny, ramshackle private schools just about everywhere. Dr. Tooley's book "The Beautiful Tree" covers the phenomenon and how widely-spread it is.
Seems poor people, when the government schools are lousy enough, or non-existant, simply set up their own schools. Whoever has the entreprenuerial grit and enough education to convince very poor parents they might be able to education their child, simply goes into business.Sometimes in contravention to laws meant to maintain the government school monopoly.
I imagine Messrs Zuckerberg and Gates must have some knowledge of Dr. Tooley's findings else they'd have gone through the government education bureacracies as so many charitable organizations before them. Government education agencies are inevitably inefficient, typically corrupt and never accountable. I imagine both Mr. Gates and Mr. Zuckerberg, with their experience of trying to breath some life into the American public education system, understand the futility of trying to improve the performance of third world education bureacracies.
The Bridge model seems to be following in the footsteps of those tiny, private school Dr. Tooley discovered and while the article doesn't specifically mention them it seems pretty likely that the people who've opened their own private schools already will be among the first to see the value of working with Bridge.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
"Am in Redmond this week. Wanted to catch up with you, You might be aware of the work Bric team is doing on the proactive EDGI like proposal. Given the impact of Education market in India globally for us and the threats from Linux and piracy, I want to make this a big bet plan in India (post Novell – Sco and Trishul) ref.
"EDGI is a customer-focused program that is for circumstances (like the one you reference) where an education and/or government customer is going to purchase naked PC’S or PC’S w/Linux" ref