Virtual World

I am writing about this because it is one of the things happening in the tech world that seems really nuts to do. There is an article about it moving closer to reality.
Why? Isn’t good to get kids wired up? Won’t it give them advantages? I think it is good in culturally appropriate ways bring networking tools to people in the third world. I don’t think plunking down laptops for 10 million of the ‘poorest kids’ by the end of 2007 is a good idea.

How hard that is should be one key measure of the project’s success. One Laptop plans to send a specialist to each school who will stay for a month helping teachers and students get started. But Negroponte believes that kids ultimately will learn the system by exploring it and then teaching each other.
By July or so, several million are expected to reach Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, Thailand and the Palestinian territory. Negroponte said three more African countries might sign on in the next two weeks. The Inter-American Development Bank is trying to get the laptops to multiple Central American countries.

I am particularly erked by this project because it feels just like western attempts at so called development in the past. We gave the third world free grain in the 50’s and 60’s and in doing so we found a place for our excess supply but also ended up collapsing local markets – reducing their long run ability to feed themselves.
Then there was the green revolution that brought mechanized agriculture, fertilizers, hybrid seeds and debt to big agriculture.
How about large scale infrastructure projects those were really awful…the recycling of petro-dollars into the third world. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a good place to read more about that stuff. I studied Political Economy and Human Rights in college – I wrote my thesis on the Lost Opportunity for Sustainable Development in Palestine. I know all to well the way ‘big projects’ happen and largely ‘TO’ people in the third world they are not initiated BY people in the third world by by western trained elites and the people who manipulate them. Negroponte seems to have the White Man’s Burden in spades. Why because he is bearing a computer is it any different then past efforts?
Look at Elena Norberg-Hodge’s work she first went to Ladakh (basically the part of Tibet that has always been in India) in 1975 trained as an anthropologist she documented the culture as the west ‘arrived’ Hs has a book and movie called Ancient Futures: Learning from LadakHe. The International Society for Ecology and Culture is her organization.

In Ladakh and elsewhere, modern education not only ignores local resources, but worse still, robs children of their self-esteem. Everything in school promotes the Western model and, as a direct consequence, makes children think of themselves and their traditions as inferior.
when you introduce this Western schooling, you’re turning whole cultures, whole peoples, into failures.
These quotes are from excerpts that you can read below.

He has this slide in his TED talk.

The basic principles:
1) Children are our most precious natural resource
2) The solution to poverty, peace, environment is education.
3) Teaching is one but not the only way to achieve learning

I think he is missing a critical part of this analysis that western education is disconnecting people from their cultures.

More from Helena:
In every corner of the world today, the process called ‘education’ is based on the same assumptions and the same Eurocentric model. The focus is on faraway facts and figures, on ‘universal’ knowledge. The books propagate information that is meant to be appropriate for the entire planet. But since only a kind of knowledge that is far removed from specific ecosystems and cultures can be universally applicable, what children learn is essentially synthetic, divorced from the living context.

He talked about how Steve Jobs had been to africa and seen early on how kids just swam in this new medium. This is no doubt true. That’s what kids do is get into things. The question is deeper…it is about cultural context meaning and relivancdy.

More from Helena:
For the young Ladakhis, especially the teenaged boys, who are looking for an identity and a role model, this image [of modernity] has a very powerful impact.He speaks in his talk about how this worked in Maine (the US state) where they legislated one laptop per child in 2002 and 3 years later have great results. Ok those are western kids using western machines. He says the time for pilot programs is out…we know this works (works for WHAT?) and that if countries don’t buy one for every kid in their whole country then they are not eligible for the program.

He says that there is one thing people have an issue with noting that people “really don’t like to criticize it because it is a humanitarian effort and to do so would be stupid.” The one thing that people had an issue with is that they
Brian has written about the project’s lack of environmental consideration in several posts….The Race To Cheap,

Without an e-waste program in place, however, it may be a terribly great addition to the progress of industrial technology in polluting the entire world with its heavy metal laden products.
How can the industrialzed west spread complex, resource heavy products into every remote reach of the world, with no responsibility for their end of life care? The people receiving them have no capacity to deal with them, by definition.

Electronics Everywhere, for Kids

At the same time, the Semiconductor Industry Association reports some dizzying figures for growth of semiconductor sales of all kinds worldwide (basically, electronic components). Put that together with the science that is showing subtle and powerfully ill effects of chemicals from electronics on pregnancy and small children, and we have got what I call, a health issue.

If I am so against the $100 laptop then how do I propose the network expand? I do like the last/first mile projects that I first learned about at a conference in Santa Barbara. They do “Hybrid Real-Time, Store-and-Forward WiFi Mesh”
Helena Norberg-Hodge text that the quotes above are drawn from.

From an essay the Pressure to Modernize:
Western-style education
No one can deny the value of real education—the widening and enrichment of knowledge. But today in the Third World, education
has become something quite different. It isolates children from their culture and from nature, training them instead to become narrow specialists in a Westernised urban environment. This process has been particularly striking in Ladakh, where modern schooling acts almost as a blindfold, preventing children from seeing the very context in which they live. They leave school unable to use their own resources, unable to function in their own world.

For generation after generation, Ladakhis grew up learning how to provide themselves with clothing and shelter; how to make shoes out of yak skin and robes from the wool of sheep; how to build houses out of mud and stone. Education was location-specific and nurtured an intimate relationship with the living world. It gave children an intuitive awareness that allowed them, as they grew older, to use resources in an effective and sustainable way.

None of that knowledge is provided in the modern school. Children are trained to become specialists in a technological, rather than an ecological, society. School is a place to forget traditional skills, and worse, to look down on them.

Western education first came to Ladakhi villages in the 1970s. Today there are about two hundred schools. The basic curriculum is a poor imitation of that taught in other parts of India, which itself is an imitation of British education. There is almost nothing Ladakhi about it.

Most of the skills Ladakhi children learn in school will never be of real use to them. In essence, they receive an inferior version of an education appropriate for a New Yorker. They learn from books written by people who have never set foot in Ladakh, who know nothing about growing barley at 12,000 feet or about making houses out of sun-dried bricks.

This situation is not unique to Ladakh. In every corner of the world today, the process called ‘education’ is based on the same assumptions and the same Eurocentric model. The focus is on faraway facts and figures, on ‘universal’ knowledge. The books propagate information that is meant to be appropriate for the entire planet. But since only a kind of knowledge that is far removed from specific ecosystems and cultures can be universally applicable, what children learn is essentially synthetic, divorced from the living context. If they go on to higher education, they may learn about building houses, but these houses will be of concrete and steel, the universal box. So too, if they study agriculture, they will learn about industrial farming: chemical fertilisers and pesticides, large machinery and hybrid seeds. The Western educational system is making us all poorer by teaching people around the world to use the same industrial resources, ignoring those of their own environment. In this way education is creating artificial scarcity and inducing competition.

In Ladakh and elsewhere, modern education not only ignores local resources, but worse still, robs children of their self-esteem. Everything in school promotes the Western model and, as a direct consequence, makes children think of themselves and their traditions as inferior.

A few years ago, Ladakhi schoolchildren were asked to imagine their
region in the year 2000. A little girl wrote, ‘Before 1974, Ladakh was not known to the world. People were uncivilised. There was a
smile on every face. They don’t need money. Whatever they had was enough for them.’ In another essay a child wrote, ‘They sing their own songs like they feel disgrace, but they sing English and Hindi songs with great interest… But in these days we find that maximum people and persons didn’t wear our own dress, like feeling disgrace.’

Education pulls people away from agriculture into the city, where they become dependent on the money economy. Traditionally there was no such thing as unemployment. But in the modern sector there is now intense competition for a very limited number of paying jobs, principally in the government. As a result, unemployment is already a serious problem.

Modern education has brought some obvious benefits, like improvement in the literacy rate. It has also enabled the Ladakhis to be more informed about the forces at play in the world outside. In so doing, however, it has divided Ladakhis from each other and the land and put them on the lowest rung of the global economic ladder.
from an interview in Context:
A family would not have $100 in traditional Ladakhi society, and yet people are not poor, because their basic needs are met. But for the young Ladakhis, especially the teenaged boys, who are looking for an identity and a role model, this image has a very powerful impact.

I think this at least partly explains why, if you travel around the world, you see that in almost every culture on this planet, teenaged boys are desperately trying to get blue jeans and cassette players and sunglasses, the symbols of modern life. More than anything, the drive is a psychological one. We need to be much more aware of our impact on other cultures. And often, because they’re not aware of that, the impact of westerners’ presence is a very destructive one. But there are ways that one can try to change that.

These are exerpts from an interview in 1992.

You’re very critical of modern education. You write that “it not only ignores local resources, but worse still, makes Ladakhi children think of themselves and their culture as inferior. They are robbed of their self-esteem.” How does modern education rob Ladakhi children of their self-esteem?
On many different levels. We need to keep in mind that this is true everywhere, and it is a good example of why I’m saying that it is appropriate and relevant around the world. Just recently I overheard a Ladakhi teacher saying to her Ladakhi students, “Our best poet is Wordsworth. Now let’s read some Somerset Maugham.” The same thing is happening in Bali, Africa, South America. The fact is that Wordsworth is not their poet. The distance between this English poet and Ladakh or Bhutan or Bali buries their own history and heritage. It’s become so shameful that it isn’t even visible. It’s making their heritage and their resources invisible. It also robs them of self-esteem. Everything that they represent–and this is particularly true of earth-based or indigenous culture–is seen as primitive and backward. It inevitably is within this spectrum that we have created of progress, meaning away from nature, away from spontaneity, away from the uniqueness of individuals, of a particular culture and place. All the time towards a type of monocultural standardization which is inherently eurocentric. Interestingly enough, it isn’t just education itself, that is the schooling. At the same time the media operate to produce the same impact. Your sense of identity is being formed by stereotyped, very distant media images. All around the world they are literally Barbie doll and Rambo for little children. That Barbie doll bears no resemblance to who I am as a Ladakhi. Barbie doll is not who anybody is. So these distanced models are destructive for everybody, even in the West. No one can live up to those models. Anorexia and bulimia and a whole range of very serious disorders are directly related to this. So this alienation, trying to remove you into another culture that is completely alien to who you are, creates a deep sense of self rejection and loss of self-worth and self-esteem. It’s just heartbreaking to watch it.
In addition, the way that Western education robs people of self esteem is that this whole process is so alien that most students fail. When I say most, I mean ninety-eight percent fail. That means that overnight, when you introduce this Western schooling, you’re turning whole cultures, whole peoples, into failures. The sense is that you are stupid, inadequate, backward. I have people in the villages in Ladakh now saying that they’re like “asses,” a Ladakhi expression that says you’re really stupid, because they don’t speak English. The whole world is being made to feel inferior if they don’t speak perfect English.
What are the implications of that?

The implications are profound. It’s the single most important message. The implications are that your whole relationship to the universe changes. You feel a type of union and communion with the rest of life and with others. I would go so far as to say that I think that our human nature needs that sense of interconnectedness, that it’s deep within us, and that it’s the only way to happiness and even the only way to real love and compassion for others.

Something we haven’t touched on enough with education was that we talked about how people’s self-esteem is lost, but more important, perhaps, their self-reliance is also destroyed through education. So we put children in schools, whether in Ladakh or Sumatra, and give them a poor imitation of the same education that a child in New York gets. That means that first of all, during your entire schooling, you are robbed of the knowledge of how to survive with your own resources. You’re not taught anything about how to grow barley in Ladakh at 12,000 feet, how to use yaks, how to make houses out of the mud that is available there. Not a word about any of the activities that you need to make yourselves self-reliant. Instead you’re studying Wordsworth, mathematics and Western history. So when you finally graduate from that school you do not know how to survive in your own environment based on your own resources. You do know how to survive as a clerk or a specialist in an urban center, but those jobs are very few and far between. It’s a prescription for unemployment, for larger and larger numbers. Also, interestingly enough, the more education you get, the further away it pulls you from your local resources and environment. So if you’ve just had some schooling, you might still stay on in your region. If you have more education, you’ve got to go to New Delhi. If you have even more education, it’s off to the West. This is the brain drain, which again is a direct consequence of policy and planning.

Thers don’t like them much either for good reasons.
Darren:

You think these mini-computers will “address the world’s education problems”? There’s the difference–I don’t. Computers haven’t addressed the education problems here in the US, where computers are much more ubiquitous than they ever will be in the bush of Africa or the forests of southern Asia or Brazil.

Jim Heynderickx:

I think back to Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heard of Borneo, which raised interesting questions of how first world products and services could have radical effects on indigenous cultures, and how the societies themselves could be permanently transformed by the integration. The end result could be a community that is much less sustainable and independent in the long run, or one that dissappears entirely.

So, I have one reaction that makes me think hard about how this is different or the same as missionaries building churches and converting the populations to Christianity. Is what is being provided stronger and better than what is being displaced? In pilot programs, the argument is that the laptops leverage the kid’s ability to learn and to teach each other. The laptops are about learning about learning, problem-solving, programming, the Papert approach, etc.
From the comments:

The difference seems to be that the programs that work start with teacher training, a clear idea of what goals will be accomplished in what classes using what software, and a lot of curriculum thinking around the idea. The programs that doesn’t work involved handing every kid a laptop and expecting teachers and students to create miracles. The latter sounds a lot like this project.