Well, but this time school has started again in the United States. Kids are strapping back on their backpacks and skipping or trudging to school where they'll be overwhelming with recess dilemmas, school lunches, and an overwhelming amount of information available through computers. No matter how much we argue until we're blue in the face about the quality of the education they get, you have to admit, at least they're getting one, and technology has become an indispensable part of that.
Which brings me back, of course, to economic development and how you have to think about it from many different angles for it to be effective. This month's focus is education.
The more educated a population is, the higher earning potential it has, the better quality of services it can provide, and the lower the child mortality rate. Thus, more widely available education is good.
Issues with getting kids to school and making sure girls are equally educated and providing teachers are entirely different complex issues with a number of solutions already in action around the world, so let's set those aside and just focus on the quality of the education.
We'll switch gears for a moment: globalization and technology. These are also things we can argue ourselves blue in the face about whether they hurt or help societies (especially in developing nations), but we can safely say they exist and they are changing the world, and if the world wants to develop, it must adapt to them.
Therefore: more educated populations need to have applicable skills, which means that they must be able to use technology.
Kids do have a knack for figuring out technology, as Sugata Mitra's experiments reveal. He embedded computers at child height in regions where children probably had never seen computers, and they would gather, play with them, and very quickly figure out how to use them. But computers are expensive and breakable! How can you bring computer and technological communication skills and internet access to kids all over the world, even way out in Micronesia?
One Laptop per Child fixes that. They provide small, highly durable (I cannot stress enough how durable), energy efficient, and education-oriented laptops to underprivileged children all over the world. Yes, even in the United States! They are not cheap, of course, and for that reason they are not handed out like toys. They are tools to help make educated individuals, and from there, educated populations.
Then we can start arguing about brain drain and outsourcing. Well, in any betterment of society, nothing stays simple. At least this organization has a very simple, straightforward function.
Payment Procedures
While the default donation page requests donations of $50-$1000, you still have the option of entering a lower amount of your choosing. For $199, you could also pay for an entire laptop and receive a card crediting you (or whoever you give in the name of) for it. You could also give stock, but that's not my area of expertise. I'm a cheap graduate who can only afford to work with cash.
