<story><title>Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves</title><url>http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tow21</author><text>Personal background: my wife works in development and has organized education projects in Ethiopia. The development community know all about this and are scathing of it.&lt;p&gt;What the article doesn&apos;t mention is that:&lt;p&gt;a) these tablets are vastly more expensive than just hiring teachers locally - by orders of magnitude. This is not a remotely scalable scheme, and frankly research budgets would be much better put to use working out how to distribute cheap teaching materials through existing education networks.&lt;p&gt;b) More perniciously, the tablets educate in English or Amharic: not in the local language of the population in question, which these children would otherwise speak; their parents are often not fluent in either.&lt;p&gt;The Ethiopian government (a dictatorship) loves this project, because it is actively trying to exterminate local languages and culture. This provides for them a route to do so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cjbprime</author><text>Hi,&lt;p&gt;Personal background: I work on this project, but only as a software engineer -- I didn&apos;t travel to Ethiopia, and don&apos;t have a development background (other than the last 6+ years at One Laptop Per Child).  I&apos;m not speaking for OLPC right now.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; The development community know all about this and are scathing of it.&lt;p&gt;People taking Approach A often think that the people taking Approach B are foolish and misguided (else they&apos;d work on it themselves); it&apos;s not a point that carries normative weight by itself.  We have to actually look at the arguments.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; a) these tablets are vastly more expensive than just hiring teachers locally - by orders of magnitude.&lt;p&gt;Well, steady.  The two villages we chose are entirely illiterate -- they have no literate adults, and no-one there has ever been to school.  One of the villages has potential access to one school that&apos;s 10 miles away and 3000 feet lower, which is not a plausible trip.&lt;p&gt;So now you&apos;ve signed up to build two schools, and then find literate teachers who want to live in or spend all of their working time teaching in a remote illiterate village.  And you realize that Oromo is highly dialectal, such that the two villages in this case speak dialects that aren&apos;t comprehensible to each other; your teacher probably doesn&apos;t know their dialect already.  Is it still orders of magnitude cheaper than tablets?&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; b) More perniciously, the tablets educate in English or Amharic: not in the local language of the population in question, which these children would otherwise speak; their parents are often not fluent in either.&lt;p&gt;There are no Oromo applications of any kind for Android, so in effect you&apos;re saying that this experiment should simply not happen, and these kids should not get to use technology.  I don&apos;t agree with that.&lt;p&gt;Even if it&apos;s successfully argued that teachers are a better solution for Ethiopia -- I certainly agree that a small class size and a brilliant teacher is a wonderful thing when it&apos;s available -- there are a hundred million kids in the world with no access to a school.  That seems worth researching a potential amelioration for, right?&lt;p&gt;Maybe you&apos;re missing that this is a pilot-stage experiment that only involved 40 children?  It&apos;s not being proposed as country-wide policy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves</title><url>http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tow21</author><text>Personal background: my wife works in development and has organized education projects in Ethiopia. The development community know all about this and are scathing of it.&lt;p&gt;What the article doesn&apos;t mention is that:&lt;p&gt;a) these tablets are vastly more expensive than just hiring teachers locally - by orders of magnitude. This is not a remotely scalable scheme, and frankly research budgets would be much better put to use working out how to distribute cheap teaching materials through existing education networks.&lt;p&gt;b) More perniciously, the tablets educate in English or Amharic: not in the local language of the population in question, which these children would otherwise speak; their parents are often not fluent in either.&lt;p&gt;The Ethiopian government (a dictatorship) loves this project, because it is actively trying to exterminate local languages and culture. This provides for them a route to do so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>backprojection</author><text>So Meles was Tigray, and the new guy is from Wolayita, not Amhara. Why would these guys want to stamp out local cultures and replace them with the Amharic language?&lt;p&gt;I think rule #1 with regard to Ethiopia is that non-Ethiopians don&apos;t know what they&apos;re talking about, no matter how well-intentioned they are.</text></comment>