The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (29 page)

ONE LAPTOP SAVES THE WORLD

In the early 2000s, seductive new technologies whipped parents, teachers, school administrators, and even governments into a fundraising frenzy. Cupcakes were sold by the thousands to get computers into classrooms. Unbridled optimism made feasibility and outcome studies—usually the mainstay of ministries of education and school boards—suddenly irrelevant. Technology would transform education and democratize academic achievement. With access to a computer and the web at her fingertips, each child would learn at her own level. Books, not to mention classrooms, would soon be obsolete, one teacher told me, and her second-grade students needed to adjust right away. Digital and especially mobile technology would go where no teacher had gone before.

On the international scene, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project envisioned a digital utopia in which all kids in developing countries would be online. Spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte, one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab, the project aimed to put a new low-cost, networked laptop in the hands of every child over six around the world. The idea was that given a computer, children from impoverished or remote communities would teach themselves and their families how to use it. And that’s how knowledge would spread. To quote digital education theorist Mark Warschauer, it
would be drive-by education: adults could distribute the laptops and then walk away.
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Already loaded with a unique operating system called Sugar, the machines would be more reliable than human teachers, according to supporters. And as any twelve-year-old could provide tech support, there would be no operation or maintenance costs. “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 as one third of the teachers never show up at school,” Negroponte explained. His MIT colleague and a founding partner of the laptop project, Seymour Papert, asserted that once each kid had a computer, face-to-face instruction wouldn’t be necessary. “There are many millions, tens of millions of people in the world who bought computers and learned how to use them without anybody teaching them. I have confidence in kids’ ability to learn.”
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Kids are wired to learn, that’s true. But certain basics must be in place before they can learn more than frustration, as many teachers in impoverished communities discovered decades ago. There were One Laptop programs in American urban settings, such as Birmingham, Alabama, where students ultimately spent less time on homework and creative work and more time in online chat rooms after getting their free laptops, according to Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames, who led the study. The researchers noted that teens in low-income families often get less supervision from adults, many of whom are working long hours, and so use their laptops mainly for entertainment: to play games, to chat, and to download music and movies.
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Like a television, laptops can be used as an educational tool. But usually they’re not.

Negroponte’s utopian vision was intended primarily for developing economies where the challenges turned out to be different. Many of the proud new owners of the laptops are children without access to indoor plumbing and electricity. One young American
electrical engineer who volunteered with one of the first and biggest OLPC programs, in Peru, noted in his blog that the problems could be big (the kids were often sick) or small (easily broken laptop keyboards), but the accretion of obstacles overwhelmed any educational goals. Uncontaminated drinking water was hard to come by in the village, so his students often had diarrhea and were too sick to learn. Electrical outlets to charge the laptops and Internet connections—a basic tenet of the OLPC program—were sparse. And often there was no one around to repair the buggy laptops when they broke down.
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These were such common problems that much of the online commentary about One Laptop programs around the world dealt with trying to solve technical bugs as opposed to asking the fundamental question—could kids really learn more from these laptops than they could from a responsive, well-trained teacher?

No one really had the answer when the program was launched. Yet, enticed by the promise of mobile technology and the concrete nature of the gift (a box of brand-new laptops is more palpable than a teacher training program), corporate money poured in. Individual donors followed suit, especially under the North American Give One, Get One program, through which a $400 donation would yield one specially designed laptop for the donor and one for a child in a developing country. In 2012, seven years after its inception, the annual One Laptop Per Child budget was $12 million a year and 2.5 million laptops had been shipped to children in developing countries.
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The upshot? Kids’ self-esteem seems to rise when they own a laptop, but there’s no sign that their reading or writing skills improve.
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In Haiti, for example, where fifteen thousand laptops have been distributed, half of the country’s third-grade kids can’t read a single word of French or Creole. That makes sense, given that a third of Haitian children between five and fourteen don’t attend school, a figure that is likely higher for older teenagers.
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In
Nepal, where a subsidized OLPC laptop costs $77 and at least 2,500 laptops have been handed out, the government spends only $61 a year for a student’s education, according to 2010
UNESCO
figures. Such scant investment in education is one reason why 79 percent of second-grade students in Nepal are illiterate, laptops or not.
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In comparison, in 2010 the United States spent almost two hundred times that amount: $11,000 a year per elementary school student and $12,000 per high-school student.
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Our unabashed love affair with providing mobile technologies for students everywhere prompts serious moral questions alongside the educational ones. Malaria has surged by a shocking 250 percent since 2009, the year the One Laptop program began distributing its new computers in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo. Needless to say, laptop programs don’t cause malaria or civil wars, and one could argue that children’s education should progress while a country faces other problems. But when 200,000 people, including children, are dying of a transmissible disease each year and most families cannot afford a three-dollar mosquito net, much less pay for their children’s school fees, medical care, school uniforms, or textbooks, an expensive laptop project seems not only misguided but absurd. “If they have to choose between food and a mosquito net, they choose food,” said Kalil Sagno, the region’s head of child survival for
UNICEF
.
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And who can blame them? The cost of one laptop would buy about sixty-seven mosquito nets or pay a teacher’s salary for a month in most OLPC countries.

PROFESSOR GADGET

Closer to home, when laptop initiatives sprang up in schools, I wasn’t immune to the hoopla. I enrolled my twelve-year-old son in an experimental program that was launched in 2000, the year he started high school. One of many such laptop programs springing up across North America and Europe, its immediate coup was seducing a committed, technologically savvy group of parents flush enough to
shell out the $1,000 for a laptop for just one child in the family. Like the One Laptop program, the idea was that each child would have a computer that wouldn’t have to be shared. Its second achievement, if you can call it that, was valuing proficiency in PowerPoint and Excel over low-tech tools such as paper-and-pencil tests and term papers. It soon became clear that I had made a mistake.

My son and his classmates spent their time surfing the web and playing computer games; if the teacher walked by, the students would skillfully toggle to the current classroom screen. Overblown sophomoric PowerPoint presentations became the homework assignment of choice (one of my son’s first presentations featured an animated turd that hovered over his subject’s head, like a thought balloon in a comic strip). He thought the whole thing fun at first. But soon all the class time the teacher was spending trying to lure the students’ attention away from screen distractions became frustrating. After a year he wanted out. The school administration, anxious to prove that the pilot program was working, wouldn’t allow it. So committed were they to their experimental laptop program that they wanted empirical proof that it worked, no matter what. They got it by keeping the highest-performing students in the laptop class, sometimes against their will.

The interesting question is why otherwise exacting parents and school administrators have fallen so hard for classroom technology. In his book
When Can You Trust the Experts?
psychologist Daniel Willingham uses research in cognitive science to debunk sacred cows in education. Lying on the junk-heap of no-evidence-to-support-them are such longtime favorites as learning-styles theory (some students are visual learners, others are auditory learners, and each must be taught accordingly), the whole-word method of teaching reading (memorizing whole words is better than sounding them out), and left-brain, right-brain education (analysis happens in the left hemisphere, creativity in the right). None of these approaches has much of an empirical leg to stand on, but they
continue to draw fervent support because people gravitate toward simple explanations and glom onto anything that confirms them. But not all popular ideas are created equal, Willingham writes:

The shift from student-centered to technology-centered classrooms has been swift, and expensive. In 2005, Bill Clinton asked Congress for $46.3 million for laptops,
SMART
Boards, and other digital gear for the nation’s teachers and administrators. Since then, the US government has spent more than $40 billion to computerize its classrooms; the annual instructional technology bill for its ninety-nine thousand K–12 schools is about $17 billion.
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The U.K. bought early into the technology juggernaut. In the mid nineties, Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to underwrite
SMART
Boards for every British classroom, a move that had cost British taxpayers 1.67 billion pounds by 2005, and the money is still flowing.
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Meanwhile, in 2012, the Australian prime minister of the day, Julia Gillard, allocated $11.7 million to the One Laptop Per Child project, for fifty thousand laptops for students living in remote areas.
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When such heads of state, not to mention scores of well-meaning parents like myself, have been persuaded to part with mountains of cash to put the latest technology into the hands of students, one might expect that equally large mountains of evidence exist
somewhere to support the venture. But more than a decade after laptops, interactive whiteboards, and tablets were introduced into millions of North American and European homes and classrooms, there’s very little evidence that the technology boosts achievement. In fact, the data largely show the reverse. With the advent of new technology programs, most teenagers’ academic performance either stagnates or plummets.

You’d think we’d be familiar with this trope by now. High expectations follow the appearance of most new technologies. The telephone was predicted to be the “antidote to provincialism,” author Tom Vanderbilt writes, and was credited with the genesis of skyscrapers and the multinational corporation. Grandiose predictions accompanied the television too. Its inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, thought his brainchild would bring world peace. “If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about their differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past,” writes Evan Schwartz, Farnsworth’s biographer.
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Given how ubiquitous and compelling networked devices are to most teens (and adults), we tacitly assume that these machines will teach them what they need to know.

A second assumption behind the vast public spending is that access to technology will reduce any educational gaps between rich and poor. Access to technology would just make learning happen. But does it? In the early 2000s, economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd decided to test the idea systematically. Over five years, nearly one million American students between grades five and eight were assessed annually in math and reading and were asked to fill out detailed questionnaires about how they spent their time outside school. By tracking the students’ academic progress against the dates computers and broadband became available to them, the researchers were able to assess the technology’s impact. The news was not good. “Students who gain access to a home computer between 5th and 8th grade tend to witness a persistent
decline in reading and math test scores.… The introduction of high-speed internet service is similarly associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades.”
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With the advent of home computers, the students’ reading, writing, and math scores dropped, and they remained low for as long as the researchers kept tabs on them.

One explanation is that the computers displace other activities such as homework and face-to-face social contact. Many of the kids used their newly acquired networked devices to surf the net, play video games, and download music, movies and porn, rather than attacking that book report on
Great Expectations
. Even worse, instead of leveling class differences in education, access to a laptop and the Internet seemed to widen them. Even within an economically disadvantaged group, the relatively weaker students (boys, blacks) were more adversely affected than other kids. After their computers arrived, their reading scores fell even further.