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."
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.
Hey we need a new pool of cheap H1Bs
The Chinese, Indian and Eastern European devs are starting to get costly
They're doing much more amazing stuff over at www.worldreader.org! Delivering thousands of hardened, solar-powered Kindle eInk devices filled with 1,000s of books for a complete classical education to children all across Central and Eastern Africa. I believe in them so much I donate 10% of every paycheck to them and have given them $10s of thousands so far. My money went directly to give ~2,000 Ugandans more material than their city has ever known (population 500,000). Check them out.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
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.
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.
You require more vespene gas.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Small Part Native American here. Grandpa and mom are buried on the Res.
Not that my heritage should matter, but some people can't hear the message until they've decided what bucket to put the messenger in....
How is the way of life and/or world view of the Native Americans worth saving?
Same question for impoverished rural Africans?
We are having this conversation only because an objectively superior culture with an objectively superior propensity for technical development has built this amazing medium for our use.
My ancestors were excellent hunters, excellent farmers, and excellent stewards of natural resources. There are many things to admire and respect about what they did.
Ultimately, however, I'm glad I don't live in a house made of animal skin; I'm glad I have modern medicine; I'm glad my other ancestors - my white European ones - have shot themselves into space, and have opened a way for my children to someday get off this rock.
In many ways, Humans of all colors and shapes are still participating in the tribal violence that shaped native Americans and still shapes many Africans.
Some tribes are better run than others, with better results to show for it. Adapt or die.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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.
My ancestors were ... excellent stewards of natural resources.
Your ancestors hunted North American mega-fauna to extinction, and regularly set fire to the prairies. Destruction of the environment by Native Americans was limited primarily by their lack of technology with which to do so.
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.
No finger pointing allowed. All of our ancestors, as many of us continue to do so today, made mistakes due to lack of options, or ignorance.
Some tribes are better run than others, with better results to show for it. Adapt or die.
I'm in the same boat, heritage-wise. My nick here was supposed to be a jab at my tribe's early assimilation into European culture (it seemed way more clever when I was a kid), but ultimately it was assimilation that led my tribe to be much better off than many others, even if we are much more "white".
Efforts like the one in the article are less about preserving failing tribes and cultures and more about assimilating their individuals into our own. Hopefully, they bring the good aspects of their culture with them and we are all richer from the process. Part of the reason that they're still stuck in a failing culture is because their lack of education limits their mobility and independent growth.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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).
Missionary work is ultimately what got native Americans.
Comparing Africa to the Americas is very misleading. Native American populations were decimated by Old World diseases. That didn't happen in Africa, where natives had long been exposed to smallpox, measles, etc. In fact, their greater resistance to many tropical diseases, which disproportionately killed white colonists, helped protect them. If you look at Africa today, the areas that are the most prosperous, are those areas where colonialism was deep and pervasive, leaving behind strong institutions, and economies linked to the wider world. The least prosperous areas are those with little colonial influence, especially isolated inland areas.
The biggest mistake they made was giving up their way of life and their world view.
The opposite is true. By any objective measure, those that gave up tribalism and adopted western ways, are doing the best. If you look at income, infant mortality, maternal mortality, violence, longevity, nutrition, literacy, health, sexual abuse, alcoholism, or any other measure you can think of, tribal societies are at the absolute bottom.
Another question to wrestle with:
Why didn't the colonization and empire building go the other direction?
Why weren't the native Americans launching ocean going vessels towards Europe? Why, when the Europeans arrived, were the NAs unable to repel them?
Why were there so many top-notch German scientists and engineers in that society in the 1930s and 1940s? Why, given its amazing technological advantages, did Nazi Germany still ultimately lose the war?
If you want a really uncomfortable question: why was South Africa apparently a much nicer place -- for everyone -- under European management with the distasteful Apartheid policy? Why has that society _regressed_ since kicking out the colonial invaders?
There are books on these topics that take varying points of view.
My point is very simple: pining for primitive cultures is romantically appealing but intellectually dishonest. And holding our ancestors to the standards of today is also silly - we can only hold them to the standards of their day --- unless you mean to imply that there has been no human progress.
It is precisely the fact that the Western world has shown dramatic human progress - even at the cost of slowing its own rate of expansion and conquest - that we can be confident that Western Civilization has something to offer the world.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
unless they are Hot, the Women's Studies professors that is.
They are not.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.