Adolph Hitler once said, “Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state. The state will take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing. Your child belongs to us already….what are you?”
Vladimir Lenin once stated, “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a Socialist state.”
So what is going on with the O.L.P.C. (one laptop per child)?
Founded by Nicholas Negroponte an MIT graduate who also started Wired Magazine. Nicholas himself has stated that the OLPC itself is “an education project; not a laptop project.”
Mr. Nicholas wrote a best selling book in the 1995 called Being Digital.
A direct quote taken from this book being,
The heavy price paid in countries like France, South Korea, and Japan for shoving many facts into young minds is often to have students more or less dead on arrival when they enter the university system. Over the next four years they feel like marathon runners being asked to go rock climbing at the finish line.
In the 1960s, most pioneers in computers and education advocated a crummy drill-and-practice approach, using computers on a one-to-one basis, in a self-paced fashion, to teach those same god-awful facts more effectively. Now, with the range of multimedia, we have closet drill and practice believers who think they can colonize the pizzazz of a Sega game to squirt a bit more information into the heads of children, with more so-called productivity.
I’m sorry what? God-awful facts?
Critics panned the book, calling his ideas as “techno-utopian.”
Techno-Utopian is defined in Wikipedia as any ideology based on the belief that advanced science and technology will eventually bring about a techno-utopia, a future society with ideal living conditions for all its citizens.
I know another person that believed such thoughts. Karl Marx, the father of socialism, stated that technology and science were the right and left hands of the “realm of freedom”
While I agree that children should be kept up to date with current technology and should be given the means and know how, and that education is of the utmost importance. The problem I see is when you dismiss political, and cultural views of the places these children are from, you destroy a society and build a new one upon it’s ashes. Seems eerily reminiscent of his ideals in 1995 that he is making a reality today.
Children will be taught, but will be taught only what is preloaded on their computers. Once the network is setup the lessons they learn will be what is sent to them on their flickering screens.
The worlds largest corporations are backing this. Why? We are talking about billions of future consumers, and trillions of dollars in advertising connected globally.
Do I have my worries that this may be a bad move for our world’s children? Yes, I do.
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