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Digital Technology Can Help Reinvent Basic Education In Africa (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: African countries have worked hard to improve children's access to basic education, but there's still significant work to be done. Today, 32,6 million children of primary-school age and 25,7 million adolescents are not going to school in sub-Saharan Africa. The quality of education also remains a significant issue, but there's a possibility the technology could be part of the solution. The digital revolution currently under way in the region has led to a boom in trials using information and communication technology (ICT) in education -- both in and out of the classroom. A study carried out by the French Development Agency (AFD), the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), Orange and Unesco shows that ICT in education in general, and mobile learning in particular, offers a number of possible benefits. These include access to low-cost teaching resources, added value compared to traditional teaching and a complementary solution for teacher training. This means that there's a huge potential to reach those excluded from education systems. The quality of knowledge and skills that are taught can also be improved.
Or? I believe that the biggest mistake Africa made was booting the Dutch, Belgians, and British out. Africa, all of it, would be so much better today if still under European control.
The problem is, as said in TFS: "32,6 million children of primary-school age and 25,7 million adolescents are not going to school". Step one: get them in school, where a teacher has access to them.
Then this: "ICT in education...offers a number of possible benefits...these include access to low-cost teaching resources"
Um, no. Low cost is chalk and a blackboard. Pencil and paper. Using digital technology, especially for primary school children, is an idiotic idea. The kind of idea dreamed up by technology fans who haven't got the slightest clue about the actual challenges facing the kids there.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Have you been to poor Africa?
It is unbelievably poor - we are not talking 1/100 of your money, not 1/1000. There poverty is really like 1/10000 - maybe more.
They are so staggeringly poor and so many, that you feel completely hopeless to help.
Even if you sold every thing and lived on the street, you would still have a better access to food and water and shelter.
Technology is a long way off being cheap enough.
Send them the iPads my kids use in school. Damn things are horrible for anything but rote math drilling. Daughter was trying to show her work by zooming in and writing between questions with her finger. The rule in this house is to do it on paper. Don’t let Apple into your schools.
The OLPC was a bad idea on paper, and a total failure in practice. We don't need "possible benefits", we need to do stuff that we know works. I've had enough of corporations (Microsoft, now Orange) throwing billions at educational experiments.
Technology is a solution in search of a problem. Basic education needs human interaction, as our Tech Leaders do actually know - that's why they teach their kids without tablets or smartphones.
There is no scientific nor even empirical evidence that adding digital bells&whistles to teaching "enchances" it, let alone reinvents it.
Silicon Valley, mind your own business - the world doesn't need you to save himself!
Because, hey, we need to include witch doctors, magic and shit as real science.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I would guess a similar number attending Christian schools run by missionaries.
Nobody gives a fuck about Africa.
Except perhaps the ehm... 1.2 billion people living there (projected to grow to ~4 billion over this century, or just under 40% of the world population). Or those countries that are affected when people from Africa migrate there. Like Europe & the Middle East. Or people affected by climate change when fossil fuel usage goes up across the continent.
So like it or not: what happens in Africa affects the rest of the world. Including you.
That's what we need. That's it. That's all.
* By "Living" I mean life skills, such as cooking, cleaning, managing a budget, hygiene, etc.
And if you can boil water and open a box of baking soda you can make crack.
Apparently the Christians get more schooling than the Muslims.
In sub-Saharan Africa, Christians average six years of formal schooling, compared with fewer than three years for Muslims.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Zero of them. Madrassas are like schools, you know?
Obviously we've addressed the issues of access to clean water, healthy food, shelter, and an end to genocide and slavery in Africa, so now we can focus on providing school age children access to internet-connected tablets and reinvent education in Africa.
We did address the water, food, shelter, genocide and slavery issues in Africa right? I mean, why else would we focus on teaching techniques in lightly-attended schools?
Ken
It wasn't that long ago that HIV/AIDS was spreading like wildfire on the African continent because there was a belief that HIV/AIDS could be cured by having sex with a virgin...
Ken
Because to these "humanitarians" once we drop internet-linked tablets into the hands of starving Africans they can just order up a case of bottled water and basic food supplies from Alibaba, Amazon, Harrods, or other online retailer... See, problem solved.
Brilliant.
Almost as brilliant as requiring people that can't afford to buy health insurance to pay a fine to subsidize the premiums of other people's healthcare coverage, but I digress...
Ken
You don't understand, the problem with Baltimore public schools is the horrible salary, benefits, and pension the teachers suffer with - it's not access to technology, Baltimore Public schools have just about completing their one-to-one initiative.
Ken
The less exposure the ignorant and vulnerable have to the fundamentalist crazies (regardless of what flag they wave), the better.
Actually, what you need is a critical mass of people making these things relevant. A friend was teaching in an African school, and after a couple of years kinda had the epiphany, or maybe doubt, that in their current level of developmentt higher education was not really what was needed. These things take many generation to develop
Um, no. Low cost is chalk and a blackboard. Pencil and paper. Using digital technology, especially for primary school children, is an idiotic idea. The kind of idea dreamed up by technology fans ...
That seems correct because generations who learned that way did not suffer for it. All those people who built Apollo hardware and sent man to the moon learned that way, so did the great scientists and writers; John von Neumann and William Shakespeare did not learn to read on iPads. However, the argument for digital education is fundamentally economic, yet your argument about the efficacy and comparative prices of paper, pencils, chalk and blackboards does not address overall costs of education in circumstances specific to African nations.
We should not project our own experience onto Africa; what was true here is not true there. Whereas Western and Eastern civilizations in modern times are pervasively literate, the best achievable outcome for sub-saharan Africa would be a sparsely-distributed literate minority subculture. The economics of distance learning required to support that would differentially favor technology-based education.
In western nations it is economical to send children to the local schoolhouse where paper, pencils and chalkboards are used because shared teaching resources are distributed across almost all the children in the community. For example, if 12 children are sent to the village schoolhouse to learn to read, then when the teacher stands up and recites the alphabet on the first day of class, the cost of that teaching per child is 1/12 what it would be were she teaching one child alone. With high mean intelligence this works even at low population densities, the one-room school house of the American frontier is a good example.
That model fails in Africa because so few child are capable of learning to read proficiently. The sad fact is, and really, I am not making this up or exaggerating: In many African nations, most people are mentally retarded. Mental retardation is defined by an IQ score under 70. Niger has a mean IQ of 69. Guinea and Liberia 67. Here is a list. The village schoolhouse no longer makes sense when very few children in the village could learn to read usefully. Tele-learning, on the other hand, is ideal for educating sparsely-distributed populations. Even if everyone else in the village is stupider than a box of rocks, the one smart kid has access to teachers, similar students, and material. Conventional, local teaching methods which are effective and efficient in Western society are mostly ineffective and inefficient in Africa because there most students are too stupid to learn. The effort of teaching is wasted on most African students. With digital tele-education, education can target intelligent students alone, though they are few and far in between.
We could ask, if most Africans are retarded, then what is the point of trying to educate them? Educating Africa is worthwhile because even a small literate minority can serve a larger illiterate community; Need to order replacement part for the village water pump? Go ask the village smart person, who can read the manual and parts catalog. It's not just that one smart guy who benefits from fixing the pump.
The past enormously wasteful efforts at African education were founded on misguided principles. One: discredited blank slate ideology. Everyone knows it is bunk, even its strongest academic advocates. There is a reason why Harvard admits the best candidates instead of the admitting the worst and then educating them into the brightest and the best: The latter method fails. Another, an invalid argument by analogy: Medieval Europe's low literacy rate owed to scarcity of labor and resources. Everyone except a few nobles and the priesthood had to toil away at manual labor to avoid
It wasn't that long ago that HIV/AIDS was spreading like wildfire on the African continent because there was a belief that HIV/AIDS could be cured by having sex with a virgin...
additional examples:
Penis-Snatching Panics Resurface in Africa.
Witch doctors sacrificing children in this drought-stricken African country
Malawi Police Arrest 140 After Mob Attacks on 'Vampires'
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Can they use technology to reinvent Richard Henry Pratt too? Isn't that the point of being a globalist? One global uniform culture?
What's it like to be a coward?
I'd start with gorilla.bas.
If only they taught something useful...
Ezekiel 23:20