technologyreview | Have you watched a two-year-old use an iPad?
The meteoric rise of modern instructionism, including the misguided belief
that there is a perfect way to teach something, is alarming because of
the unlimited support it is getting from Bill Gates, Google, and my own
institution, MIT. While Khan Academy is charming and brilliantly
nonprofit, Salman Khan cannot seriously believe that he and a small
number of colleagues can produce all the material, even if we did limit
our learning to being instructed.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a
nonprofit association that I founded, launched the so-called XO Laptop
in 2005 with built-in programming languages. There are 2.5 million XOs
in the hand of kids today in 40 countries, with 25 languages in use. In
Uruguay, where all 400,000 kids have an XO laptop, knowing how to
program is required in schools. The same is now true in Estonia. In
Ethiopia, 5,000 kids are writing computer programs in the language
Squeak.
OLPC represents about $1 billion in sales and deployment
worldwide since 2005—it’s bigger than most people think. What have we
learned? We learned that kids learn a great deal by themselves. The
question is, how much?
To answer that question, we have now turned our attention to the 100
million kids worldwide who do not go to first grade. Most of them do not
go because there is no school, there are no literate adults in their
village, and there is little promise of that changing soon. My
colleagues and I have started an experiment in two such villages, asking
a simple question: can children learn how to read on their own?
To
answer this question, we have delivered fully loaded tablets to two
villages in Ethiopia, one per child, with no instruction or
instructional material whatsoever. The tablets come with a solar panel,
because there is no electricity in these villages. They contain modestly
curated games, books, cartoons, movies—just to see what the kids will
play with and whether they can figure out how to use them. We then
monitor each tablet remotely, in this case by swapping SIM cards weekly
(through a process affectionately known as sneakernet).
Within
minutes of arrival, the tablets were unboxed and turned on by the kids
themselves. After the first week, on average, 47 apps were used per day.
After week two, the kids were playing games to race each other in
saying the ABCs.
Will this lead to deep reading? The votes are
still out. But if a child can learn to read, he or she can read to
learn. If these kids are reading at, say, a third-grade level in 18
months, that would be transformational.
Whether this can happen
has yet to be proved. But not only will the results tell us how to reach
the rest of the 100 million kids much faster than we can by building
schools and training teachers, they should also tell us a great deal
about learning in the developed world. If kids in Ethiopia learn to read
without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do
not learn even with school?
