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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."
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.
Not to mention the fact that regularly setting fire to the prairies was often considered a *good* thing. It's kind of like the whole wolf issue -- people killed the wolves and then the prairie started dying. Why? Because the herd animals were no longer doing their job -- staying clumped up and tilling/fertilizing the ground in one place, then running as a group to another place, being herded by wolves. Instead they'd spread out and graze down the entire area without spending enough time breaking up the ground an adding enough fertilizer into the soil. Likewise, the burning added nutrients to the soil that helped the plants start growing sooner in the growing season, which gave the entire food chain a leg up at the beginning of the year. It's not all about Bambi.
So finger pointing is less than helpful, as you pointed out, not only because everyone's ancestors have made mistakes by present-day criteria (otherwise we'd be dead like those who didn't exploit as heavily as our ancestors did), but also, we're still happily making mistakes that some of these earlier groups never made (sometimes on purpose, sometimes by lack of technical ability, sometimes both, depending on the generation you're looking at).