Green IT Toolkit

The $100 laptop could eliminate poverty

Tags:
One Laptop Per Child,
Nicholas Negroponte,
$100 Laptop

Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman, One Laptop Per Child 0

Published: 05 Dec 2006 13:55 GMT

At the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong, the MIT media lab chairman's speech outlined why the $100 laptop could fundamentally change education.

I'm going to use the next 35 minutes, maybe 40, to describe, as thoroughly as possible, not just the $100 laptop, but also some of the impact it could have on the industry. And no matter what I say, you're all going to forget one thing, and that is that this is not a laptop project. This is an education project. And I'm so passionate about the laptop — I actually have one with me and it works, it's the first one off the assembly line — I'm so passionate about the laptop and start talking about it, that I even sometimes forget myself.

But what One Laptop Per Child is, it's about eliminating poverty. And that's the reason we do it, that's why everybody who's involved in the project is involved with it. And the belief is very simple. That is that you can eliminate poverty with education, and no matter what solutions you have in this world for big problems like peace or the environment, they all involve education. In some cases, it could be just with education and in no case is it ever without education. And we particularly focus on primary education. What happens when children start to go to school and just get the opportunity to learn learning itself. So I'm going to show you some slides, talk about this and share with you, as I said, what I think it might also do to the industry.

A lot of people say, "When did you get this idea?" Well, this particular slide is 1982, outside of Decar, before the IBM PC existed actually on the market of Eastern Europe, and Steve Jobs gave me some Apple Twos. Seymour Papert — a name I'll refer to several times — and I were working on the provision to children, a language called Logo, in developing countries.

Ten years before that, actually 15 years before that, Seymour, still at MIT or at least having just arrived at MIT, came up with a very simple observation, and that is that when children write computer programs about something like drawing a circle, they have to understand the concept of circleness a lot more than if they just read about it in the text book or somebody describes it on a blackboard. And for those of you who have written computer programs, you know that in fact, the first time you write it, it has bugs. And that when you de-bug a program, you are actually performing a set of operations that is the closest you can get to thinking about thinking.

Consider it for a moment. Writing a program and then de-bugging it is a very interesting microcosm, that children actually then engage very differently in their own learning. And we can prove that. So this goes back to some very, very fundamental concepts and very fundamental theories of children and learning. And you will almost never hear me use the word "teaching". Almost never. And teaching is just one way of learning. And most of you probably will admit that it wasn't necessarily the largest or the disproportionately hyped, that most of the learning we have all done has been quite different.

And in fact, in the first years of our lives, we all learnt how to walk, we all learnt how to talk, in ways that didn't include teachers. What they included was interacting with the world. You learnt how to walk because standing up got you something. You learnt how to talk because talking allowed you to ask for something. And you interacted with this world around you and you did a great deal of learning. Suddenly, at about the age of six, you're told to stop learning that way, and for the next 12 years, if you're lucky, you'll do all your learning by being told, somebody like me, standing here on the podium, maybe a book, maybe something. But some form of instruction. The key word being that I instruct you, I have some body of knowledge in my head, and the job is to get it out of my head and put it into your head. Well, that is a very small fraction of learning. You certainly want the pilot on your aeroplane, you certainly want the brain surgeon in the hospital to have done a lot of learning that way. But for children, learning learning is really very, very fundamental.

And the last point, what I mean by number three, is, if you look at the world as a whole, there are, in rough numbers, 1.2 billion children. Of those children, about 0.5 billion live in rural parts of developing countries. If you go to a rural part of a developing country, you find that the education is even more primitive. This is certainly true in China and India. By the way, China and India together have almost 50 pecent of the children in the world. Now when you go to these rural schools, the teacher can be very well meaning, but the teacher might only have a sixth-grade education. In some countries, which I'll leave unnamed, as many of as one-third of the teachers...