XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old [LWN.net]

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 10, 2009 1:25 UTC (Sat) by Alterego (guest, #55989)
In reply to: XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old by dlang
Parent article: Changes at OLPC

I agree that educating the not so poor will later help the poorest.

OT: Wrt to food problem, the problem is not world productivity, it is agriculture subventions which allows US and EU to control food for a big part of the planet, and causes misery by preventing primary economy development. Fighting false ideas is very important for human development, that's why i insist so heavily on this, sorry :-)

to post comments

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 10, 2009 2:19 UTC (Sat) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

We're getting pretty far from the topic of laptops for children. But before you pin the problem on agriculture "subventions" - which I guess means control exerted through capitalism on the production and distribution of food - you should also consider the Malthusian aspect. The major governors of population throughout history, and no doubt before, have been famine and disease. Even with the most efficient possible production and allocation of food, eventually the population would reach a point at which all would be hungry, if illness wasn't killing us off. I can't believe we could be very far from that point today. The only long-term solution would be for human beings to limit their own procreation to a level at which the ecosystem can sustainably feed us.

Bruce

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 12, 2009 5:33 UTC (Mon) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

s/subvention/subsidy/ in my posts (and s/subsidy/zero/g in US and EU :-)
The control is exerted by subsidies to the richest countries ! (cotton...)

Agreed.
And one good news is: the number of child per family decreases when people gets richer.

http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;...

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 15, 2009 13:41 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

IMHO this is silly. What's causing damage to Africa is the kleptocracy that's the dominant government form there. A country will get nowhere with a dictator who wants to stay in power even when the population dies due to the effort. You certainly will hear a lot of excuses that the help provided by outsiders is hurting the people.

If you look at other parts of the world, things go quite differently. Asia has developed very significantly during the last decades. There are still poor countries, there are still many countries where the political system is not up to western standards, but at least the dictators are benevolent. They don't kill their own people, like they did in the 60s and 70s.

However, I think the originator of this subthread is right: You should not concentrate on the small children first; if you only have a limited amount of founding, take the students first. The benefit there is higher. It raises the education of the elite, and whatever you think about equal democracy, it's always the elite who sets the direction of a country. When they are stupid, uneducated, and selfish, they will ruin it.

One problem of third world countries is the quality of teachers. Negroponte want to "solve" that problem by skipping the teacher. I don't think you can. By helping the students first, you can create sufficiently good teachers, and it does not really take that long. By the time the OLPC really is a billion unit product, you'll already could have a few million capable teachers.