The Village Effect by Susan Pinker

Author:Susan Pinker [Pinker, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-679-60454-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

One Laptop Saves the World

In the early 2000s, seductive new technologies whipped parents, teachers, school administrators, and even governments into a fundraising frenzy. Cupcakes were sold by the thousands to get computers into classrooms. Unbridled optimism made feasibility and outcome studies—usually the mainstay of ministries of education and school boards—suddenly irrelevant. Technology would transform education and democratize academic achievement. With access to a computer and the web at her fingertips, each child would learn at her own level. Books, not to mention classrooms, would soon be obsolete, one teacher told me, and her second-grade students needed to adjust right away. Digital and especially mobile technology would go where no teacher had gone before.

On the international scene, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project envisioned a digital utopia in which all kids in developing countries would be online. Spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte, one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab, the project aimed to put a new low-cost, networked laptop in the hands of every child over six around the world. The idea was that given a computer, children from impoverished or remote communities would teach themselves and their families how to use it. And that’s how knowledge would spread. To quote digital education theorist Mark Warschauer, it would be drive-by education: adults could distribute the laptops and then walk away.35

Already loaded with a unique operating system called Sugar, the machines would be more reliable than human teachers, according to supporters. And as any twelve-year-old could provide tech support, there would be no operation or maintenance costs. “When you go to these rural schools, the teacher can be very well meaning, but the teacher might only have a sixth-grade education. In some countries, which I’ll leave unnamed, as many as one third of the teachers never show up at school,” Negroponte explained. His MIT colleague and a founding partner of the laptop project, Seymour Papert, asserted that once each kid had a computer, face-to-face instruction wouldn’t be necessary. “There are many millions, tens of millions of people in the world who bought computers and learned how to use them without anybody teaching them. I have confidence in kids’ ability to learn.”36

Kids are wired to learn, that’s true. But certain basics must be in place before they can learn more than frustration, as many teachers in impoverished communities discovered decades ago. There were One Laptop programs in American urban settings, such as Birmingham, Alabama, where students ultimately spent less time on homework and creative work and more time in online chat rooms after getting their free laptops, according to Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames, who led the study. The researchers noted that teens in low-income families often get less supervision from adults, many of whom are working long hours, and so use their laptops mainly for entertainment: to play games, to chat, and to download music and movies.37 Like a television, laptops can be used as an educational tool. But usually they’re not.

Negroponte’s utopian vision was intended primarily for developing economies, where the challenges turned out to be different.

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