Last updated: March 16, 2014



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World News

Peru's One Laptop Per Child policy comes with big cost

Peru One Laptop Per Child

Five years after Peru launched its costly 'one child per laptop' program, many teachers and students don't even know how to turn them on, critics have said. Picture: AP Source: AP

FIVE years after Peru gave a free laptop to 800,000 schoolchildren, there are serious doubts about the program.


Yet five years in, there are serious doubts about whether the largest single deployment in the One Laptop Per Child initiative inspired by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte was worth the more than $SU200 million ($195 million) that Peru's government spent.

Ill-prepared rural teachers and administrators were too often unable to understand, much less teach with the machines, software bugs didn't get fixed, internet access was almost universally absent and cultural disconnects kept kids from benefitting from the machines.



The volume of "education" computers delivered globally remains modest. Intel says it has shipped more than 7 million, about a third in Argentina. Venezuela boasts 1.6 million distributed, licensed by a Portuguese company.



OLPC laptops, which are rugged and energy efficient and run an open-source variant of the Linux operating system, are in Australia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia and Haiti, and even in the US.


No country, however, bought nearly as many as Peru.



Inter-American Development Bank researchers were less polite.


"The magical thinking that mere technology is enough to spur change, to improve learning, is what this study categorically disproves," said co-author Eugenio Severin of Chile.







"We knew from the start that it wouldn't be possible to improve the teachers," he said, citing a 2007 census of 180,000 Peruvian teachers that showed more than 90 per cent lacked basic math skills while three in five could not read above sixth-grade level.



Each teacher was supposed to get 40 hours of OLPC training. That hardly helped in schools where teachers had never so much as booted up a computer. In Mr Patzer's experience "most of them barely knew how to interact with the computers at all."





In the higher grades, Ms Martinez said, children's use of the machines is mostly social. They have the internet, and Facebook is big. So are online games.


Educators say that's a clear sign the children haven't been properly introduced either to the internet or to what is on the machines, which have digital cameras and audi recorders, programming tools and a trimmed-down Wikipedia.


His proposal last year to parachute tablet computers from helicopters, limiting the involvement of adults and "educators," caused some colleagues to wince. But Mr Negroponte is dead serious, and has begun a pilot project in two Ethiopian villages to test whether tablets alone, loaded with the right software, can teach children to read.



Uruguay, a small, flat country with a far higher standard of living and ubiquitous internet, has honoured those requirements

Peru did not.


But those schools' very remoteness complicated matters.

Some parents, mistakenly believing themselves the laptops' owners, tried to sell the machines, Mr Becerra said.


Some schools didn't have enough electricity to power the machines.

And then there was the Internet. Fewer than 1 per cent of the schools studied were online. Not only were kids deprived of the chance to widen their horizons and meet like-minded students, they were also deprived of access to updated software purged of bugs.



The contrast couldn't be starker in Uruguay, whose program has been touted by Mr Negroponte and others as a model although no major outside study has been done of it.

Programming festivals that Flores helps organise in Uruguay have led to the development of applications that teach geography and chess, play radio stations and read to the blind.



Mr Marcone's office will continue to support the laptops and replace broken ones.

