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India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register)
The Register reports
that India has decided not to participate in the One Laptop Per Child
project. "The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as
'paedagogically suspect'. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: 'We
cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot
stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy
tools.'" The article also notes that Nigeria has ordered one
million OLPC systems.
(Log in to post comments)
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 26, 2006 20:40 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] That was my initial reation to the OLPC thing - in many parts of the world they need teachers and classrooms much more than they need computers. And yes, the geek in me thinks it's cool and wants one!
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 26, 2006 20:48 UTC (Wed) by daney (subscriber, #24551) [Link] I agree.
I went through high school taking physics, chemistry, calculus, etc. without ever needing to use a computer even once. I am very suspicious, of schemes that claim to revolutionize basic education via computers.
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 26, 2006 21:32 UTC (Wed) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] "I went through high school taking physics, chemistry, calculus, etc. without ever needing to use a computer even once." The OLPC project is geared for kids who (a) are at basic levels of learning; i.e., the Three R's; and (b) don't have access to school and/or public libraries, like we did... or PBS broadcasts of "Sesame Street" on the TV at home. And yes, armed with a 1950s/60s public-school education, I, too, took (and passed) those same classes, using paper, pencil, and slide-rule. I think the point of OLPC, and perhaps its most important element, is "leveling the playing field." Rural India, and the rest of the 3rd/4th-world countries, are still playing "catch-up". I believe that OLPC will help them do so, all the more quickly. YMMV.
You could afford textbooks Posted Jul 27, 2006 16:29 UTC (Thu) by emk (guest, #1128) [Link] On the other hand, you actually had access to books.
Look at the other posts in this thread: These laptops are intended as textbook replacements, and cost the same as roughly 3 years worth of textbooks.
I don't think that the experiences of a well-funded American school district in the mid-20th-century are especially relevant to villages with no libraries, electric power or (often) reliably clean water. (On the other hand, Indian villages contain a suprisingly large number of cellphones, because they require less infrastructure, and can be manufactured for ~US$10 each.)
Third-world education is a different problem, and requires a different toolset. Now, OLPC might not be the best answer. But if they can promise an average lifetime of 4 years, this would lower the cost of education, and greatly increase the library size available to each student.
So OLPC deserves more than a brush off. Even in the third world, fancy modern electronics can actually be cheaper than building lots of low-tech infrastructure.
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 26, 2006 21:51 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] How many classrooms and teachers can you get for ~ $100?
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 26, 2006 22:08 UTC (Wed) by daney (subscriber, #24551) [Link] In a developing country, you could probably get one teacher/classroom for a year for $100. You could teach say 20 children there.
Ok so that is probably an under-estimate, but within an order of magnitude probably close.
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 2:01 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] > you could probably get one teacher/classroom for a year for $100.At prestigious city schools in India where most middle-class children study, salaries are comparable with Western rates of pay; but village public school teachers' wages are only Rs1200-2500 per month. So yes, one of these laptops would cost a teacher's wage -- not for a whole year, but for a couple of months. On the other hand printed textbooks can be comparatively expensive; students can be charged Rs500 (approx $US11) for a single book. Many schools make buying the books new each year mandatory. This may be in lieu of fees, which aren't charged by public schools, so it probably doesn't reflect the actual cost of the books to the school. http://hrw.org/reports/2005/education0905/4.htm#_ftnref15
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 0:04 UTC (Thu) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link] You forgot the "per child" bit of the question, which puts a completely different spin on it.
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 10:23 UTC (Thu) by botsie (guest, #1485) [Link] > How many classrooms and teachers can you get for ~ $100?
In India? You'd probably get a teacher for a month. Multiply that by, say, 30 students in a class and soon you have a serious bit of pocket change there.
-- b
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 0:35 UTC (Thu) by surajvijayan (guest, #17740) [Link] One laptop per child is quite clearly an initiative by a group of companies to make profit. It never had any motive to make children laptop savvy or enrich developing countries. Too many people are falling into the trap of bringing in IT to solve social problems. A child needs a proper school, good teachers and a system that cultivates the child to be creative and get a good foundation in life. What is essentially needed is teacher, a blackboard, chalk pieces and good books. Giveing a laptop to every child is a crazy idea, it does nothing other than fatten the pockets of private companies..
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 2:44 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] Giving a laptop to every child is a crazy idea, it does nothing other than fatten the pockets of private companies... <cynic> I think you forgot an important part to that sentence:"...at the expense of governments!" This gives me repsect for India. As for Nigeria... I think the biggest exposure most of us have to that government is the constant spam scams, and now this. ;) They obviously don't have issues taking handouts, we'll see how many of these end up on Nigerian bureaucrats' desks, when questioned about it you can expect the same answer as when questioned about the 409 scams! </cynic> I know that that response was worthy of slashdot, but I am getting a little tired of all the coverage given to this project which is obviously of a highly political nature. And when I say political, it is not like RMS's politics which are directly relevant to free software. This has to do with giant subsidies and socialism, not free software. OK, I admit the technical articles about OLPC were very interesting... Maybe I'm just a little grumpy tonight. I can't help but wonder how many others are getting tired of this vaporware spotlight (just because it will supposedly run free software does not make it vaporware!)
The value of a decent education Posted Jul 27, 2006 3:21 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Of course good teachers come first, and good teacher education. As longas education has to be cheap, then no good education is affordable. The budget of the average village school doesn't extend to this kind of technology -- yet. But if the Rs5000 price tag -- once per student or teacher, for her whole school career -- isn't affordable, then that student's education as a whole is already seriously underfunded. Education budgets *will* increase, if only because of India's rapid growth. But with textbooks retailing at Rs1500 per year per student, the OLPC *already* looks like an attractive alternative. It brings the price of a child's laptop down by an order of magnitude. It will be as affordable to many Indian schools (ok, not the ones that pay a teacher Rs1000/month to teach 50 kids, but *many* schools) in 2008 as Apple laptops were to Maine schools in 2000. If it was a good idea for them, why isn't it a good idea for India? > What is essentially needed is teacher, a blackboard, > chalk pieces and good books. The laptop is supposed to supplant the textbooks, not the rest of the recipe. It is expected to have a working life of many years and its (wholesale) cost is not more than the (retail) price of four years' worth of mandatory primary school textbooks for one public school pupil. For all I know the school's retail markup on the textbook price goes towards the teacher's wage; so let's generously allow that the real cost to the school of the textbooks is half the price the pupil pays. But doesn't the Indian publisher of those books make a hefty profit on even that wholesale price? You're right that the money will be going to a manufacturer in Taiwan and not to Indian publishers -- but the profit margin on OLPC hardware is so low that it is rather disingenuous of you to say that it does 'nothing other than fatten the pockets of private companies'. What it does do is drive technology innovation -- the companies are in it for the spin-offs much more than for direct profit -- and it has the potential to foster development of unprecedented information networks amongst populations who have never had them before. Skepticism is healthy, but providing teachers and children with personal, portable networked computers might not be quite as 'pedagogically suspect' as you may think: http://www.mcmel.org/MLLS/
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 26, 2006 21:17 UTC (Wed) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools." Nonsensical. These are hardly "fancy tools"; certainly not in any financial sense of the word, neither in the Apple eye-candy-laptop sense. And why is there, of necessity, a conflict between OLPC and "classrooms and teachers"? I would expect these ruggedized units to have a hardware and software lifespan which would certainly cover the needs of elementary- and middle-school students. And from where does this guy think the teachers are going to come? Perhaps he envisions 20-something CS grads and/or software developers from Bangalore or Mumbai just chucking it all, giving away their newly-acquired prosperity in a Mother Theresa-like gesture, and moving out to those backwater villages. OTOH, there might be a new generation of American 1960s types who want to do a work-study program at some ashram. I dunno... and John "Maddog" Hall's mumbling comment about recycling used computer equipment would be my (an 18-year Unix sysadmin) worst nightmare! Just imagine having to install, configure, network, and generally administer a hodge-podge collection of old castoff hardware. Does Banerjee -- a career political administrator -- honestly believe that the OLPC's IT professionals like Nicholas Negroponte, et al, haven't done their homework, and have it all wrong? I'm thinking "Not!"
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 14:38 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] ...believe that the OLPC's IT professionals like Nicholas Negroponte, et al, haven't done their homework... Why should they believe they have done their "homework" -- the Internet allows Indian education administrators to read the history of MIT Media Lab projects. Within education circles there is a lot of discussion about the cost efficiciency of PCs versus other learning aids. And that's for a hardware and software platform that has basically been unchanged in the fundamentals from 1995. OLPC cannot expect a consensus adequate for the spending of Rp billions for an untested aid. Countries like India are well accustomed to rich foreign institutions inflicting inappropiate technologies, so they are naturally sceptical of the OLPC. I've been quite amazed at the lack of engagement of OLPC with the teaching communities. The few OLPC presentations on the web talk in Silicon Valley Technical Jargon or Computer Vendorese. It's not even clear what the purpose of the machine is, in an educational sense. There's a world of curriculum material missing, even from the limited aims I've seen. For example, the discussion above talked about using the OLPC to supplant textbooks. So where are the texts? The idea in the discussion that the high cost of the OLPC can be spread across a decade of education is laughable. Even in kind environments computing equipment doesn't have that sort of life. OLPC is not an aid project. The proposal is that the Indian government pay for the hardware, so that hardware needs to compete against other parts of the education budget. That budget is dominated by staff and building costs. Acquiring OLPC means less teachers. The OLPC has insufficient history justify this. Nonsensical. These are hardly "fancy tools" Maybe not to you, but perhaps you should consider how few people in the world have actually ever used a computer. ...Banerjee -- a career political administrator... A biased description. The page you link to also says he is a prize-winning poet, a published playwright, and on the board of a UNESCO-funded literacy research institute. Hard to think of a more qualified person to make the decision. And if it is the wrong decision then it's of no consequence to Indian education. In that case the OLPC will be a success and the project will continue and India will buy the OLPC some time in the future.
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 15:48 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] The idea in the discussion that the high cost of the OLPC can be spread across a decade of education is laughable. Even in kind environments computing equipment doesn't have that sort of life. You'd be amazed... it is just that after 2 - 3 years you don't want the machine anymore, not that it is useless. Around here SIMM memories for i486 class machines are still in demand, because they are used in industrial-grade PCs of that aera. And again, if giving children in the US PCs is a good idea, why should it be a bad idea making them affordable elsewhere? One thing that amazes me every time I talk to a school teacher is how they insist on basic skills like being able to do arithmetic with paper and pencil, when you can get a simple calculator almost for free now. What needs to change is what is taught to children, making them aware and able to use what radical innovations like the Internet have to offer. I guess the change brought about by the printing press (and later almost everyone being able to read and write) were seen as equally nonsensical in their beginning. The machines alone won't make a difference, people have to change to make machines useful. But if the machines aren't available, nothing will happen...
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 27, 2006 16:42 UTC (Thu) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] > One thing that amazes me every time I talk to a school teacher is how they> insist on basic skills like being able to do arithmetic with paper and > pencil, when you can get a simple calculator almost for free now.
I sincerely hope you are being sarcastic.
The purpose of basic education is to teach the student *principles* and *techniques*, not which button to push to achieve the desired result.
If you throw a cheap calculator at a student rather than teaching them the basic principles of arithmetic and the methods and techniques for solving math problems with no tools beyond paper and pencil, how the hell will they ever *learn* and *understand* mathematics? And what will form the basis for further learning?
To put it in IT terms, wouldn't you rather people learned the principles behind how computers operate, instead of just which checkboxes in a MS application dialog box to check? The former empowers them and enables them to build incrementally on their existing knowledge without limit, and maybe lets them solve their own problems - especially when those problems go beyond the limits imposed by the tool they are presently using. The latter keeps them from learning and just reinforces the view of things (computers, calculators) as magical black boxes beyond the powers of mere mortals to understand, and keeps them from ever growing beyond being anything but stupid lusers.
Don't sell students short by giving them scooters before they've even learned how to walk.
> What needs to change is what is taught to children, making them aware
All machines are force multipliers.
The Internet is a force-multiplier for the mind, as a repository for searchable knowledge and a mechanism for rapid communications between people.
If you don't first have the ability to *use* your mind - to ask meaningful questions, to find and understand the answers, to integrate those answers into what is already known, and to detect and resolve errors - then the Internet is useless. The force it will multiply is that of serving as a source of entertaining and distracting pablum.
Once they know *how* to ask questions, once they know *what* questions to ask and *what to do* with the answers, *then* they can be taught how to use the Internet to search and explore a much broader base of knowledge much more quickly.
> The machines alone won't make a difference, people have to change
I agree that machines alone won't make a difference. I disagree that that machines are a *substitute* for basic skills and understanding, which seems to be the position you are arguing.
> But if the machines aren't available, nothing will happen...
Shakespeare composed all of his works without a word processor.
Newton figured out and codified most of the rules of large-scale physics without a calculator.
The pyramids were designed and built to very high degrees of precision without calculators or anything beyond the simplest construction machinery.
Students must be educated with basic problem solving skills and a basic set of facts. Machines can be used to improve the efficiency of this process, but they cannot be a substitute for this process - *this* is the point the Indians are making. Giving students laptops is not going to magically improve their education. They may be important force multipliers for the learning process, but there must be something provided *beyond* them, there must be a learning process in place for them to enhance. Otherwise they may be worse than useless.
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 30, 2006 11:44 UTC (Sun) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link] I wholeheartly agree. Unfortunately there is more and more the trend to argue "but they will always use computers later" even in countries where Leibnitz developed calculus (and the first add-multiply-machine, btw.).
India rejects One Laptop Per Child (Register) Posted Jul 28, 2006 13:30 UTC (Fri) by illtyd (guest, #2124) [Link] "And again, if giving children in the US PCs is a good idea, why should it be a bad idea making them affordable elsewhere?" It would be a good idea. The point from the Indian official is that $100 each is nowhere near affordable in the light of the budget needs of Indian government schools
eTextBooks Posted Jul 26, 2006 21:33 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] I had thought one of the main drivers economically for these was that storing ebooks on them instead of buying physical textbooks would save money in buying them, save hassle and money distributing them, and allow updates more often. These factors alone paid for the laptops, and having up to date texts for everyone, in their native language, rather than 30 year old foreign castoffs for a few, was all the moral justification you needed. I would even think that refusing to buy these would be almost criminal under certain circumstances. and if India is worried about being able to afford teachers, the economics would help.
There's also the idea that students can take their textbooks home with them, rather than having to lug around ten pounds of real books.
eTextBooks Posted Jul 28, 2006 13:34 UTC (Fri) by illtyd (guest, #2124) [Link] So in addition to USD100 per student for laptops, the government is also supposed to divert money from building schools and paying teachers to digitise, translate and update textbooks as well?
There are some good points about the OLPC plan, but an "appropriate technology" approach to education and an understand of the budget impact of $100/student additional spending are note among them.
Sigh Posted Jul 28, 2006 14:15 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] Read the other posts with actual numbers. The cost of the laptop plus the cost to acquire and electronically distribute eTextbooks is less than the cost to acquire and physically distribute real textbooks.
On top of that cost savings, the students don't have to carry around a pile of heavy physical books. They can now carry around hundreds of books.
Plus the books can be updated and actually relevant to the locale and the time, rather than out of date castoffs from a foreign country in a foreign language.
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