Will the $100 $175 Laptop Save the World's Children?

The price of Nicholas Negroponte's "One Laptop Per Child" project has just gone up to US $175. But even at that price, the laptop is a steal. Sharp display, built-in hand crank generator, wireless network, and other extras, now will come with Windows, as well as Linux.

The XO machines will be made by Quanta Computer Inc., the world's leading maker of portable computers. Quanta agreed to take a profit of about $3 per machine, less than what it gets from mainstream PC companies, Negroponte said.

Even so, the cost of the machine - which boasts extremely low electricity consumption, a pulley for hand-generated power, built-in wireless networking and a screen with indoor and outdoor reading modes - is now $175. The One Laptop project takes an additional $1 to fund its distribution efforts.

.... Even at $175, the computers upend the standard economics in the PC industry. A huge reason for the low cost has been XO's use of the free, open-source Linux operating system, tweaked for this project with the help of one of its sponsors, Red Hat Inc.

The result is that XO's software is highly original, in hopes of making the computer useful as a collaborative tool and intuitive for children who have never before encountered a computer. There are no windows or folders, but rather an interface heavily reliant on pictographic icons.

However, Negroponte disclosed that XO's developers have been working with Microsoft Corp. to make sure a version of Windows can run on the machines as well. It could be the $3 software package that Microsoft announced last week for governments that subsidize student computers. It includes Windows XP Starter Edition and some of Microsoft's "productivity" software.

...Whether the XO machines might someday land in U.S. schools has been an open question. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney announced at one point that he wanted to buy the machines for students in his state. Some time later, Negroponte said Thursday, One Laptop Per Child decided not to work with American schools because "we've designed something for a totally different situation" - meaning kids in poor countries.

Now, he added, that might change, since 19 state governors have expressed interest. One of them was then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. When Bush first e-mailed and casually signed "Jeb," Negroponte needed to ask his brother, former national intelligence director John Negroponte, whether the query was legitimate.

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Not a bad starter laptop for kids, not bad at all. But computers will never make up for a lack of good teachers, lack of good curricula and texts, lack of parental interest and support, and they especially can never make up for the disastrous German 1800s approach to schooling that turns schools into mechanistic assembly lines.

If this laptop can help some children learn to teach themselves, and help them acquire a love for learning and self-teaching, then the money and effort will have been well spent.

North American government schools are a disaster, and laptops will not change that. Whether schools in the third world will benefit from the laptops depends upon how they are presented and situated in the overall teaching scheme.

It is easy to imagine these laptops in madrasas in Pakistan, helping young muslim boys learn to be better suicide bombers or terrorists. It is also easy to imagine the laptops diverted by corrupt governments, and resold on the market to provide cash for Swiss bank accounts. You know it will happen.

The average IQ for humans on Earth is around 89 or 90, using the UK population as the mean of 100. In 50 years, the average IQ for humans is expected to drop to 84, for various reasons of population dysgenics. If the laptops can do anything to reverse that dead-end trend, who would object?