I know that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. Not everyone involved in the “laptop for every child†is motivated by greed; some are motivated by a zeal that comes from an inability to figure out what the problem is and how it can be most effectively solved. The operative word is “effectively.†You can always use a cannon where a fly-swatter is sufficient. But for the cost of a cannon, you can get a million fly-swatters which will be more effective than one cannon. Cannons are more impressive then fly-swatters, however, and that may explain their fascination with some people.
A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop. In fact, a TV and a media player is pretty much all the hardware that you need to provide basic education to a village full of children. That hardware (and some free software) would cost all of $200 a year, and if you pay about $2000 a year as salaries to a couple of village school teachers, you can educate a 100 kids for about $20 per child per year. Compare that to just buying $100 laptops for each kid.
There are, I think, two areas of total disconnect from the parties for and against the $100 laptop that I am just beginning to grasp. Negroponte’s background will help you point the way.
Why, exactly, do some people feel compelled to try and squash the $100 laptop?
1) It’s too hard.
Yes it is hard. Not just to try and build a $100 laptop, but perhaps more complex is pulling off effectively building tens of millions as they expect to. But as someone once said, most world-changing ideas start with a handful of people in a room determined to go against common sense.
But as many engineers looking at the project point out, it’s eminently possible. With no profit margin and re-spec’d components your already in the $150-200 range. There is little doubt that another year and some real determination can bring that under $100.
So it is a risk, and that leads everyone to their second point…
2) Is it worth it?
$100 is a lot of money to a developing country. A laptop in the hands of a child in a small village and got to do a hell of a lot of good to be worth that much. It better actually be able to get to the Internet, and it better not break in a way that’s unfixable. And.. well, isn’t $100 better spent elsewhere?
Lots of economists will point to blackboards, malaria shots, and siding more direct benifit funding. And those are worthy causes, they just aren’t the point of this particular cause.
What I think most anti-laptops for kids people miss is that this isn’t about teaching kids, this is about giving kids tools to learn on their own.
Can’t they use a blackboard? Not to have a live programming environment, to not only learn the basics but actually be able to creatively excel with a computer. If this was just about passive learning, then video tapes would be the way.
Negroponte founded the Media Lab, where the clear goal was that more learning comes from the intermixing of disciplines (in this case, artists with programmers) than from simple top-down teaching. And that is what makes the laptop, and the Internet, so powerful.
It is a vision of the future that may have a small percentage chance of working, but that does not make in a unworthy goal.
I didn’t say that it was an unworthy goal, just a poorly executed one.