Fire and Knowledge

The $100 laptop moves closer to reality

Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations….

In addition, Massachusetts is working with MIT on a plan to distribute the laptops to schoolchildren, Negroponte said.

“This is the most important thing I have ever done in my life,” Negroponte said on Wednesday during a presentation at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. “Reception has been incredible. The idea is simple. It’s an education project, not a laptop project. If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.”

Let me quote this part again: “It’s an education project, not a laptop project. If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.” That, my friends, might be the best example of “stupid talk” regarding computers and education I have read in a while.

The statement is wrong. The “$100 computer project” is not an education project. It is a computer project. What does education have to do with a $100 computer? Specifically, what does primary and secondary schools have to do with computers? The answers is “nothing.”

Technology is not the answer to education. It isn’t even a possible answer. It’s like saying a desk is the answer to education. What education needs is better teachers, better curriculum, less computers and video games, more reading and writing–to only name a few. To say that computers will help education is to ask the wrong questions and give the wrong answers.

I think it would be fitting to end with a quote by Neil Postman, from a speech entitled “Informing Ourselves to Death”:

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.

The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people — perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot.