The $100 laptop could eliminate poverty

The One Laptop per Child scheme (OLPC) is about so much more than just creating a cheap PC according to the project's boss Nicholas Negroponte

At the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong, the MIT media lab chairman's speech outlined why the $100 laptop could fundamentally change education.

I'm going to use the next 35 minutes, maybe 40, to describe, as thoroughly as possible, not just the $100 laptop, but also some of the impact it could have on the industry. And no matter what I say, you're all going to forget one thing, and that is that this is not a laptop project. This is an education project. And I'm so passionate about the laptop — I actually have one with me and it works, it's the first one off the assembly line — I'm so passionate about the laptop and start talking about it, that I even sometimes forget myself.

But what One Laptop Per Child is, it's about eliminating poverty. And that's the reason we do it, that's why everybody who's involved in the project is involved with it. And the belief is very simple. That is that you can eliminate poverty with education, and no matter what solutions you have in this world for big problems like peace or the environment, they all involve education. In some cases, it could be just with education and in no case is it ever without education. And we particularly focus on primary education. What happens when children start to go to school and just get the opportunity to learn learning itself. So I'm going to show you some slides, talk about this and share with you, as I said, what I think it might also do to the industry.

A lot of people say, "When did you get this idea?" Well, this particular slide is 1982, outside of Decar, before the IBM PC existed actually on the market of Eastern Europe, and Steve Jobs gave me some Apple Twos. Seymour Papert — a name I'll refer to several times — and I were working on the provision to children, a language called Logo, in developing countries.

Ten years before that, actually 15 years before that, Seymour, still at MIT or at least having just arrived at MIT, came up with a very simple observation, and that is that when children write computer programs about something like drawing a circle, they have to understand the concept of circleness a lot more than if they just read about it in the text book or somebody describes it on a blackboard. And for those of you who have written computer programs, you know that in fact, the first time you write it, it has bugs. And that when you de-bug a program, you are actually performing a set of operations that is the closest you can get to thinking about thinking.

Consider it for a moment. Writing a program and then de-bugging it is a very interesting microcosm, that children actually then engage very differently in their own learning. And we can prove that. So this goes back to some very, very fundamental concepts and very fundamental theories of children and learning. And you will almost never hear me use the word "teaching". Almost never. And teaching is just one way of learning. And most of you probably will admit that it wasn't necessarily the largest or the disproportionately hyped, that most of the learning we have all done has been quite different.

And in fact, in the first years of our lives, we all learnt how to walk, we all learnt how to talk, in ways that didn't include teachers. What they included was interacting with the world. You learnt how to walk because standing up got you something. You learnt how to talk because talking allowed you to ask for something. And you interacted with this world around you and you did a great deal of learning. Suddenly, at about the age of six, you're told to stop learning that way, and for the next 12 years, if you're lucky, you'll do all your learning by being told, somebody like me, standing here on the podium, maybe a book, maybe something. But some form of instruction. The key word being that I instruct you, I have some body of knowledge in my head, and the job is to get it out of my head and put it into your head. Well, that is a very small fraction of learning. You certainly want the pilot on your aeroplane, you certainly want the brain surgeon in the hospital to have done a lot of learning that way. But for children, learning learning is really very, very fundamental.

And the last point, what I mean by number three, is, if you look at the world as a whole, there are, in rough numbers, 1.2 billion children. Of those children, about 0.5 billion live in rural parts of developing countries. If you go to a rural part of a developing country, you find that the education is even more primitive. This is certainly true in China and India. By the way, China and India together have almost 50 pecent of the children in the world. Now when you go to these rural schools, the teacher can be very well meaning, but the teacher might only have a sixth-grade education. In some countries, which I'll leave unnamed, as many of as one-third of the teachers...

...never show up at school. And some show up drunk. So really, if you are going to affect education, you cannot just train teachers and build schools. That will take you the next 30 years and it's a long and slow process. So the only alternative is to leverage the children themselves and that's what One Laptop Per Child is. It's how can you give the child an opportunity to have a bigger role in his or her learning.

Let me give you one more statistic: that in the developing world, most schools, certainly rural schools, are two shifts. And by that I mean one group of kids goes in the morning and another group goes in the afternoon. You get double the duty cycle. A shift typically starts at eight in the morning and ends at noon. It starts late, it ends early, there are recesses. So a child is in school two and a half hours a day, five days as week. That's the amount of time a child spends in the best of all possible conditions. So you can't just do something for a school, let alone build a computer lab, which is really ridiculous. What you've got to do is to take advantage of the other hours and again that's why you're doing One Laptop Per Child.

So this is Seymour Papert, 20 years ago. Obviously a pretty rich school. This is more recent, 2002. This particular school, I actually built it myself and we shipped laptops up to this village in 2002. The kids took them home at night and the parents loved it. Because they were the brightest light source in the house. No electricity, no telephone, no water and in fact, in our five villages, two of which don't even have a road, the average income in that village is $47 a year. And would somebody like to guess what the first English word of every kid in that picture is? Yes. Exactly. It's Google. That's their first English word. The first thing the kids did, and again they only read and write Khmer, in fact these kids are so young, most of them don't even read and write Khmer, but they pretty quickly, like in 30 days, are pecking away in English and went to the Brazilian football site and they all now wear Ronaldo T shirts, for better or worse.

But the point being that this had an enormous impact, one of which is that this year, this September, in this exact same school, twice as many kids showed up for first grade. And these weren't from neighbouring villages. And clearly five years ago everybody didn't have twice as many kids. What happened was that the parents had been keeping the kids at home, not sending them to school. And just peer pressure, one kid saying to the other, "Hey, this is pretty neat. You should consider coming to school", and parents sort of thinking, "Well maybe this really, actually is something interesting".

So what we did is, we decided to scale that project. To scale this, if you look at it, the telecommunications in this picture is very elastic. We brought two megabits per second into the village, and that will support 30 kids, 50 kids, 80 kids, 100 kids. Really, you may get slower response time, but it's pretty elastic. If you want One Laptop Per Child, there's no elasticity whatsoever. You get five more kids, you need five more laptops. And one of the problems with laptops is an industry-wide problem. And trust me, I know it from both sides of the fence.

In full disclosure, let me remind you, or tell you if you don't know it, I'm on the Board of Directors of Motorola and have been for a very long time. I think I may even be close to their most senior board member in more ways than one. What do we do in the cell-phone industry? The natural tendency of electronics is to drop in price. Now what you do is, to compensate, you add features. And each year, as it drops in price, you add more features.

That's what's happened in the laptop industry. So the price is constant. The laptops I see in this room are roughly the same price they were 10 years ago. Now it's changed a little bit recently, but still not much. But as you add more and more features, you make a bigger and fatter system. And that system then starts to become unreliable. But more importantly, it starts to become so big that it's like a fat person. A very fat person uses most of their muscle to move their fat. And that's what's happened with laptops. Your laptop is using most of its muscle to move its fat. And so what we said to ourselves is: "Let's change that". And it's not that we build a compromised machine. In fact, I think I will show you, or prove to you by the end of this afternoon, that this laptop is actually better than yours.

You can find the rest of the speech here.

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