india rejects one laptop per childIndia rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register
India rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register :
issed the laptop as “pedagogically suspect”. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”
Banerjee said if money were available it would be better spent on existing education plans.
Banerjee told the Hindu: “We do not think that the idea of Prof Negroponte is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage and no major country is presently following this. Even inside America, there is not much enthusiasm about this.”
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first healthcare, then primary education, then secondary education, then computers in secondary education, then perhaps one laptop per child… if and only if, you manage to show some benefit of computers in secondary education that implies that the sole purpose of one-laptop-per-child is colonialism via technical means, by which i mean… making people dependent on foreign capital for jobs and equipment.
Actually, I gotta say that I think the Education Secretary has a point about their pedagogy. Everytime I read the OLPC website, it is all about the hardware and very little about the learning environment. Moreover, what they are proposing re: the learning environment (assuming Banerjee has read Papert’s work at all) is certainly well beyond anything which could be called “culturally sensitive” or “culturally appropriate”. It’s revolutionary enough in a place like Canada, so how can one expect it to be easily accepted and adopted in poor countries?