andrew brown says that poor children need fewer magic devices and more basics
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Suppose you were to give every child in a really poor country a hand-cranked laptop computer that they could use instead of all their schoolbooks. Since it was hand-cranked, it wouldn't need mains electricity; since it used remarkable new techniques, it would cost only $100; since it was a computer, it would bring magic into everyone's life. Wouldn't it be wonderful?
The question is quite urgent. The laptop in question may even be built in the name of the One Laptop Per Child project. A prototype was demonstrated at the World Internet Summit last month in Tunis, and serious manufacturers are involved as well as the world's greatest wholesaler of hype, Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT media lab. Interested governments include those of Brazil and Afghanistan. Using revolutionary technology, the screen - we are told - may be the
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| In the really poor world, children have no duty to realise their potential |
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only illumination in the huts where people are going to be using it.
The trouble is that the device is another example of the nerdy arrogance which assumes that if my gadget won't solve your problem, you've got the wrong problems. Americans may think it makes perfect sense to empower children directly by giving them laptops. But in the really poor world, children have no duty to realise their potential. Their job is to help support the family in ways that the family or the village decides on.
The village may decide that a school with 20 laptops, but no pencil and paper is much less useful than a school with pencils, paper, books, and a good teacher's salary. Even to the child's family, a laptop represents capital that could be more usefully deployed in other ways. Why, it's probably worth far more than they could get by selling the child. 
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