A few weeks ago in this column I discussed the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, an initiative that aims to deliver laptops that cost a measly $100 apiece to millions of third world children.
Your letters were interesting and, while about half of you were positive about the concept, about the same number weren’t so keen on the OLPC. Reader Ken Goldsholl was dubious about the idea and wrote: “It is completely unrealistic to expect hundreds of millions of extremely poor people (average annual income measured in the hundreds of dollars) to be able to take advantage of networked computers, even if they were free.”
Goldsholl continued: “But let’s say the poverty-stricken masses think the laptops are great. What will they do with them? Learn to read? How many people in the U.S. learn to read solely by computer? In every class where my kids used computers, there were teachers instructing them how to use it. If you don’t know how to read, using a computer (and the Internet) is extremely difficult without almost one-to-one supervision.”
I have to disagree with Goldsholl. Literacy and the third world aren’t mutually exclusive. In many third world countries there are teachers who can read and write and do math and are trying to teach their students these skills.
The OLPC project will help by giving these kids a tool totally unlike any other teaching materials they have. Even if all the OLPC does is to support the “Three R’s” that will be orders of magnitude more effective than the incredibly limited tools they currently have.
And if you doubt that computers have a huge impact in children’s education, there’s a lot of research going back to the early 1990s that shows the positive impact that computers can have. Add the Internet to the mix and the benefits are even greater.
A recent story in Science News called “Growing Up Online” discussed some of the recent research. For example: “Give a middle school child from a low-income household a home computer with free Internet access and watch that child become a better reader.”
In the study the mostly 12-to-14-year-old, African-American children lived in single-parent families with incomes no higher than $15,000 a year. It concluded that “text-heavy online sites seem to have provided reading experience that translated into higher reading scores and grades,” the researchers suggest. Although participants remained below-average readers at the end of the study, their improvement showed promise.”
Now before you think that the concluding sentence invalidates the argument, just consider how much further behind the kids would have been without these facilities.
My favorite quote from the story was the conclusion of the analysis I just quoted: “These findings raise the unsettling possibility that [the] children most likely to benefit from home Internet access are the very children least likely to have [it].” Exactly!
But if you think that PCs would just benefit third world children you’re not seeing the big picture.
The OLPC, ostensibly an educational tool, is also a stealth strategy for enriching disadvantaged cultures. Now some might argue that providing medical aid and food aid would be more effective.
While the aid argument might be true in the short term, unless we can afford to feed and provide medical services into the distant future (which we can’t), the only alternative is to give the disadvantaged the tools, the education and the information that will set them free of our charity and give them a political and economic voice.
The way that the OLPC will give them a voice is that it will have wireless and wired connectivity so there’s the potential for networking. This will allow news to be found by people who would otherwise be isolated from their culture’s mainstream. When you have news and then you get e-mail to connect with and organize people you become a potent political force.
Forget exporting democracy by invasion; computers and networking are less expensive, more effective, involve less bloodshed, and have a more lasting effect.
You know the Lao Tzu quote? “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Perhaps the modern version should be “Give a child food and medical aid and you care for him today. Give him education, tools, and information as well and he will able to take care of himself for the future.”
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