One Laptop Per Child
March 25th, 2007 by AndrewIf you haven’t heard of it already, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was founded with the intent of bringing a fully-functional laptop to children in the developing world as an educational aid at a price point of just $100 USD. The price point has crept up a bit since then, now $140 or so, with the inclusion of more features (the list is shockingly long), but it’s a truly impressive piece of design, at any price. Each laptop is a wireless router, connecting to each other, and the internet. And it can be manually recharged by hand, pedal, or pull-cord - don’t you wish your laptop had that?
But design aside, the question becomes, is it really what people in the developing world need? On the one hand, it does have real value as an educational system - one laptop can essentially replace all textbooks (depending, of course, on the emergence of a cohesive, affordable open-source educational commons to keep costs down), and keep them up to date without reprinting new editions. More importantly, it gives children in the developing world a chance to learn about what’s out there, and better yet, a chance for us to learn about them, and actually communicate personally. The Internet is a hell of a resource.
On the other hand, the values of computing represent a decidedly Western sense of priorities. Our condescending attitude to the developing world rears its ugly head again, even with the best intentions - “computers work for us, clearly you need them to succeed, too!” $140 dollars USD per child (purchased by the governments of said nations) sounds like quite a luxury for a computer, considering the lack of fundamental infrastructure like access to clean drinking water, food and basic medical care. Compared to buying all those laptops, with an equivalent injection of funds for traditional education (more schools, teachers, textbooks, and supplies), who knows what the balance would look like.
Its a real conundrum. Do you try address the symptoms of the problem, which are often life and death matters? Or do you try and provide people with an opportunity to become more globally connected and competitive in the longterm, so that they’ll be better able address those problems themselves?
March 27th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I forget the exact figures, but the cost of saving a few thousand lives for one year through anti-retroviral drugs (for AIDS) is the same as the cost of saving a few hundred thousand (or is it million?) lives by as many as 5-70 years through malaria cures, oral rehydration solutions, and basic vaccinations.
But everyone’s focusing on AIDS. Because, you know, white people can get it too. (And it is horrible. But, you know.)
March 28th, 2007 at 6:42 am
How is that a conundrum?
Do you arrest the person who shot JANE Creba, or do you take a look at what people are growing up in at JANE and Finch?
There’s truth to the notion that when a trigger is pulled, two people die - the victim and the killer.
Looking at that backwards, helping the down-and-out is helping ourselves twice over. No one gets anywhere by picking flies off fruit, they get to the harvest by planting seeds.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
But what exactly is planting the seeds in this case? Do you spend the money to save millions of lives in the short term by addressing neglected tropical diseases? Or do you bank on these $100 laptops as a way of providing a stronger educational base, and from that, the emergence of a more stable, productive society?
Nothing’s ever simple.