More OLPC’s means more kids and parents educated

Posted by: Kat on: Thursday, 18 September 2008

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“In Uruguay the parents wait for the kids to go to bed so they can use the laptops. So you saw people move to rural communities… so their kids could take advantage of [the laptops]. In Rwanda the families brought electricity to the schools so that the kids could keep using the laptops.”

I find that really cool. Yay for OLPC!

clipped from news.zdnet.com described the response of some commercial laptop makers to the OLPC project some of the companies have taken this as just a market to compete in — and compete in a very vicious way and that’s unfortunate, because we’re not trying to take market share and make profit or knock anybody else out, While skeptics claimed the laptops would be sold or stolen by their young owners, it seems they have been converting truants into school-lovers and encouraging kids to brush up their reading and writing if it was in a remote place, the people would say the kids only show up for school half the time. And that just changes. Now you have basically… more than 100 percent attendance. Because they come on weekends, they come early to school and they stay late The families start to take education seriously. One of our students — when OLPC was just getting started–did a project in rural Costa Rica, and 70 percent of the parents entered vocational education using the computer at night after the kids

Tags: children, education, family, foss, global issues, laptop, netbook, OLPC, portable computing, poverty