Slashdot Log In
India Rejects One Laptop per Child Program
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jul 26, 2006 06:32 PM
from the children-make-the-best-lab-rats dept.
from the children-make-the-best-lab-rats dept.
ex-geek writes "Seems like Negroponte's One Laptop per Child program has been
rejected by the Ministry of Human Resource Development of India. Among the objections are concerns about the effect of extensive laptop use on children's health. Better uses for the monies, which would be required to roll out the OLPC project, are also named. Most insightful however is the observation that not one industrial country has so far implemented a similar program for its children, which casts doubt as to what the pedagogical use for notebooks in class really is."
Related Stories
[+]
Technology: Negroponte Responds to $100 Laptop Criticisms 586 comments
teefaf writes "Wired News is running an article on the most recent developments surrounding Nicholas Negroponte's (of MIT) $100 laptop project. The project aims to make 'cheap' computers available to children in developing countries. In the article, Negroponte responds to the inevitable criticism from Intel and Microsoft, "When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you're doing something right", and elaborates on his vision for the future of the project, "He also said the display and other specifications could change as enhancements are made. In other words, he seemed to be saying to his critics: Don't get too hung up on how this thing operates now, 'The hundred-dollar laptop is an education project,' he said. 'It's not a laptop project.'". The article also states that the initial production cost of the laptops is expected to be $135; the $100 price-point probably won't be hit until 2008. It's possible that the cost could drop as low as $50 by 2010."
[+]
Technology: Negroponte says Linux too 'Fat' 839 comments
Cadef writes "According to a story on CNet News.com, Nicholas Negroponte says that Linux has gotten too fat, and will have to be slimmed down before it will be practical for the $100 laptop project. From the article: 'Suddenly it's like a very fat person [who] uses most of the energy to move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too.'"
[+]
Backslash: No OLPCs for Indian Schoolchildren 98 comments
Yesterday we linked The Times of India's report that India's Ministry of Human Resource Development has rejected implementation of the One Laptop per Child initiative in that country. Readers speculated both on why India rejected the program, and whether it's a good or bad move to have done so. As usual, there are some insightful comments with wildly divergent conclusions; read on for the Backslash summary of the discussion to see a handful of the most interesting ones.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
MS counter move (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't care about India but would love to see Bangladesh adopt the OLPC program. They have thanks to Yusun and his Microloan program almost eradicated poverty so they seem to be a more innovative people. Remember 10- 15 years ago you almost always heardf about the plight of Bangladesh? Heard anything lately? I rest my case
Some Good Points (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the pledge to buy two laptops to donate to get one free really isn't such a bad thing after all. Governments have a difficult time tturning away things that are free.
Re:Some Good Points (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. India has nuclear power -- and, of course, nuclear weapons -- plus indigenous satellite launch capabilities, the largest film industry anywhere (a.k.a. Bollywood), the fourth largest economy on Earth measured in purchasing power, the second largest global population and, to top it all off, India is the home to one of the world's oldest pre-industrial civilizations and is the origin of not one but *two* of the world's major religions, Hinduism and Buddism. Somehow, I don't think the Indian government is going to be keen to accept a program that seems adapted to third-world nations, not regional superpowers struggling for first-world status and recognition. Hell -- just based on how much software development is going on in the country, the $100 laptop ought to be a sure-fire winner, so it's hard to justify India's turning down the program for reasons other than politics and national pride.
Parent
Nigeria accepts OLPC (Score:5, Informative)
Two words (Score:5, Funny)
Sex Ed.
Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
Which may be one of the reasons countries reject these laptops. Regressive idealogies, particularly the ones that think women are only good for babies tend to reject that kind of knowledge. I know a girl who used to teach that stuff to women in the villages at the southern end of the philippines and the men there were not happy to have her around (she's a "radical feminist" by
Beyond reproductive health and self-dominion, there are lots of areas of knowledge that many societies would rather not give their children (or adults) access to. Like a pastie-covered boobie at a sporting event.
Parent
Industrial Countries have Textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Several experiments in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
I think anyone who says "feed them first, then give them a computer" misses the point that if all you do is ever feed people and then move on, that's as far as they get. I get the impression that while most people living in poverty will happily accept a meal, they will likewise fight hard and loudly to better their condition even at the risk of someone going without a meal in the process. You don't have to be a rich Western geek to understand that filling your belly today doesn't guarantee a full belly tomorrow, and food aid is notorious for drying up once a current crisis is abated.
These poor people need a leg-up, and they need it now. The emerging information market will forget they even exist if they don't learn how to interact with it on its own terms. Out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is quickly dead and forgotten.
Re:Several experiments in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the years, a few US states and many individual school districts have experimented with one-student-one-computer, to general positive results
Care to link to these positive results? I've only seen studies that show how overall useless, if not negative, computers are in the classroom, especially when you give them to students. They get broken easily, they're generally used in non-educational ways, and they're a big distraction. I doubt you can find some clear, unambiguous gains for students with laptops.
Parent
Re:Several experiments in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
As a former student of a school with a one-student-one-computer program, I'd like to point out that I'm not convinced by the positive results people are reporting. When you spend God-only-knows-how-much-money and muck around with kids' educations with a program like this, admitting you screwed up is just about the dumbest thing a person could possibly do. I can't speak for anyone else, but my high school really screwed up with that idea. That didn't stop the administrators from bragging and bragging and bragging as if these laptops had turned everyone into a genius child. (Rather than just being one more distraction.)
The part of this whole computers-in-the-classroom thing that nobody seems to be getting is that a computer is not a solution. A computer is a tool. I place people who wave the computers in the class banner all the time in the same mental category as people who are convinced that $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE is a gift from God and perfect for every situation.
If we want to fix up our schools, we should start by reviewing our crufty old educational plan that hasn't been revised for decades and basically ignores all major research on how people learn. Once we have a new plan, we can go about figuring out how to implement it. I'm sure that computers will be the best way to implement some details of the plan, but they should be used only for those things, and if it turns out that there's a better way to do something else (lectures, for example, are almost guaranteed to suck if PowerPoint is involved), then they should be avoided.
But stuff like the OLPC program seem to work from the assumption that computers are this magic bullet that will instantly improve education - through some hand-wavy magic computron field, maybe?
I agree, these people need a leg-up. I just worry that exporting this educational cargo cult we've been constructing for the past few years to countries that already have even more problems with education than us has more to do with tripping them into the mud than giving them a leg up.
Parent
lord (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Passing the buck (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Passing the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the concern about health effects may seem silly, but there have been plenty of cases where things that were relatively harmless for adults turn out to have adverse effects on still-developing children. Given this, and given that these children would presumably be using these laptops for many hours a day, asking for studies on this does not seem unreasonable.
Parent
Re:Passing the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
No kidding. I've watched school districts in the US spend insane amounts of money on computer technology on the basis of blind faith that computers will automagically improve the quality and effectiveness of education. Even if most such programs were not sabotaged from the start by failing to allocate funds to actually train teachers to use them, there is seldom if ever any effort to measure results.
(To be fair, while I was working for a school district, I saw some really creative uses of computers, but these were a) the exception, and b) still not very good uses of money compared to other things that it could have been spent on.)
The other problem that is not often considered at the outset is the maintenance cost. A school district full of computers needs a full-time support staff, which takes away money that could have gone to hiring new teachers and reducing class sizes, and it also requires regular replacement. One-third of the IT budget for the district I worked in was devoted to replacing obsolete machines.
Surprisingly, the best use I saw for computers was reducing the amount of time it took teachers and staff to take attendance and collate grades. That actually did some good because teachers had more time to teach.
Parent
Re:Passing the buck (Score:5, Interesting)
But good job on leaping straight to the "brown people must have primitive superstitions" stereotype.
Parent
Re:Particularly the psychological effects... (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember going over this in psych 101 and even the author of our textbook, Peter Gray [wikipedia.org] seemed skeptical. What is the criteria by which we measure the things children interact with? Does a toddler who only has cardboard boxes to play with grow up stupider than one who has plastic puzzles in primary colors? IIRC, Gray wondered if an inner city child who had no toys, but interacted with extended family in the house and watched cars go by each day was in any less stimulating an environment than a kid who had nintendo or plastic blocks. Is there any objective measurement? The child who interacts with adults is arguably in a more stimluating environment. Understanding, predicting, and manipulating adult minds arguably takes more mental faculties than doing the same with blocks.
When I was a boy, I remember a stick being variously a rifle, a magical staff, a metal sword, a light saber, a spear, even a spaceship. Are my analytical skills impoverished because I ran around in the woods and played with sticks instead of playing the living room with shiny, plastic transformers? I remember being bored to tears by He-Man and G.I. Joe figures that required no imagination -- everything they did was pre-determined. I prefered playing with leaves in puddles or making figures out of mud or clay.
I did *want* those toys that other kids had -- but when I got them, I certainly couldn't play with them. They were much to boring. They just sat on the shelf as models. That's really what they are.
Parent
Re:How about (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:How about (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee.cgi?path=/learn
Parent
Re:How about (Score:5, Interesting)
Do some reading on how the flood of donated clothes from the western world destroyed the textile industry in many areas of Africa. Handouts are a terrible long term solution.
Parent
Re:How about (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on how its done. Aid agencies such as oxfam have recognised this for a while - and rather than importing food to troubled areas, try to either give locals money to buy food or buy from local farmers.
Government agencies don't particularly like that however, as they'd rather spend their aid budget within their own country, helping their own farmers (its amazing how much of the average first world nation's "aid" budget will be spent within that country).
Parent
Not mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the big failings of aid and development programs in the past has been a lack of appropriateness; clueless big projects which do little or nothing to help.
It is possible that the One-Laptop-Per-Child project is one of these clueless projects. It could, however, end up as a sort of force multiplier, a source of intelligence (in the "information" sense of the word) and a form of feedback that would let aid organizations know what is really needed and where.
Parent
Re:Going to Africa next week. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:How about (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, education is not a panacea. You can over-educate a population past its economic opportunities and create a variety of problems, from the widescale loss of the best-and-brightest to other countries, to a population of resentful, overeducated people who are only able to find jobs in the lower ranks of the agricultural and industrial sectors (this is much of what happened in parts of Latin America - the Sendero Luminoso of Peru was largely officered by a generation of well-educated poor youth who found no job opportunities awaiting for them after their much-vaunted education was finished.)
England did not have the most widely educated population back when it was the richest, most powerful nation in the world. I think you might find the correlation between education and prosperity, historically, to have a number of suprises.
Parent
You need to learn some history (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite colonial occupation that bled our country for hundreds of years
That's what your politicians tell you. Find a non-politician who's 80 years old, who was there, and talk to them. India was better off under "colonial occupation" than it is today. The Brits didn't "bleed" India, on the contrary they unified it, built infrastructure (especially railways) and gave it a legal system.
A country should govern itself, not be governed by foreigners. But you have nothing to be proud of in what your politicians have done in the last 50 years.
Parent