Photo: The Dinthi Schoolhouse in 2000
One Laptop Per Child. And then what? was my first reaction to the news that developers are hoping to create a $100 computer that they will put into the hands of children in the developing world. My wife’s reaction to the project was slightly different. “Sure,” she said, “they’re going to give laptops to children that are sitting on a log in a schoolhouse with no chalkboard.”
Photo: Ellie rides her bike in the schoolyard in 2005. Her schoolhouse is in the background.
In 2005, Ellie attended the fourth grade in a village school in Mozambique and sat in the building you can see in the background of this photo. She sat next to her friend Mwada on a small log that was supported on either side by Y-shaped branches that were stuck in the ground. There were thirty other kids in the class with her. There was no lighting. For a chalkboard, mud daub on the wall had been smeared with charcoal to make a dark surface which the teacher tried to write on with chalk.
Why am I mentioning all this? Because this is just one school in thousands around Mozambique that are in this primitive state. There are nicer schools. A “nice” school is made of brick and has a tin roof. In fact, we were able to help finance the building of such a school in Dinthi in 2004. Even so, it only had three school rooms so Ellie still got to attend school in “the hut.” Of course, Mozambique can’t be said to represent every situation in the developing world but it gives an indication of the challenges being faced.
Let me try to use an illustration to show why I think OLPC is a weird idea. It’s probably safe to assume that not a single woman in our village has ever taken a hot shower or had her nails done. Wouldn’t it be great to create a program that installs hot water heaters and bath houses in African villages? And we could even put together ministry teams that visit Africa and give women free manicures! But, nobody in Africa is worried about hot showers and manicures. Most of the ladies we knew in Dinthi didn’t have access to a simple bar of soap. In the same way, providing laptops to African children is addressing an extremely sophisticated need when the basics haven’t even been addressed. Children don’t have decent desks in school. Their teachers very often don’t have any chalk and sometimes don’t even have a chalkboard.
And even if all those needs were addressed, there are so many other obstacles to a project like OLPC that it’s depressing to list them all. Issues like multilingualism, illiteracy, maintenance, and corruption will all sink the One Laptop Per Child efforts.
My final objection to this project is that it turns everything upside-down: the individual is favored over the group, the child is favored over the adult, and mediocrity is favored over achievement. I’ll talk about those issues more in my next post.
You’ve probably heard this slogan:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
I tried to think of how we might change that slogan to reflect the thinking underlying the One Laptop Per Child project:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give him a Bundt pan and he can bake a cake.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give him a GPS and he can find his exact location on the earth.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day…
How would you complete that slogan?
Give a child a laptop and he or she can learn and be envisioned about how to run a fish farm to feed the whole village for many lifetimes. Well, in principle. But I recognise that in practice a lot more than this is needed.
I’m going to ask my Nigerian guests what they think!
That would be great, Kathy.
Give a man a well and his family can have fresh water every day.
Give a man a job and he can provide for his family.
Give a man a tool(plow, hammer, sewing machine, grain mill, etc.) and he can earn a living and gain self respect.
I agree the OLPC wouldn’t do much good in Dinthi, but there are places where it would help kids with their schooling. Maybe the Bill Gates’s of the world can provide the computers and the rest of us can help with the simpler tools that would improve life in the villages of the world.
If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organise the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I stole this quote from a friend’s Facebook profile. But perhaps it captures some of the vision behind OLPC.
Dad, I like your slogans a lot. The power of the original slogan is that it highlights the difference between “give” and “teach.” It’s the difference between being the recipient of charity and being empowered to improve my own world.
Peter, that’s an amazing quote. Makes me want to get in a boat. Antonio Machado said, “The one who wants to go to sea must not be afraid of drowning.”
I found your essay on OLPC while looking for information about the mud-wattle construction. Your description of schools in Mozambique almost perfectly matches what I saw recently in Kenya.
I’ve seen schools just like these in Tanzania and Uganda as well. No blackboards. Walls caving in. Snakes and insects nesting within.
The wonderful thing is, the kids were still learning inside. They didn’t need whiz-bang technology to do it. They need good teachers. They need books. They need pencils. They need food in their stomachs so they can concentrate.
I wondered, too, when I heard of OLPC, how long would it take for the laptop to be stolen from homes that are no more secure than the schools? Or for the family to sell it to pay for AIDS or malaria drugs? And what happens when the machines get gummed up with dust that coats everything in sight? For many, many impoverished people, this is a simplistic, though well-intentioned, Western-style band-aid on a huge, open third-world wound.
I always though this was a good idea and very worthy until hearing from those of you who work in these places. Is there a way for the Bill Gates’ of the world to hear what you are saying? Our view in this country is so naive and so tainted by our own cultural perspective. Thank you for bringing this much needed perspective and “reality check”.