The same logic of bridging the digital divide was behind the wildly ambitious One Laptop per Child (OLPC) nonprofit, spearheaded by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and set up in 2005 with the backing of a vast coalition of philanthropists and technology companies. OLPC’s goal was to produce and distribute rugged, inexpensive, Internet-enabled laptops to the world’s poor with innovative features such as solar panels and hand cranks. OLPC successfully created several devices that met this goal, but in every other respect, OLPC was a colossal failure that typifies the hubris of tech-centric educational utopianism.
From the outset, education ministers and development professionals pointed out that what children in rural Pakistan or Rwanda needed most were safe schools, clean drinking water, and trained teachers—not computers. OLPC nevertheless pressed ahead, and sold nearly 3 million of its custom laptops to schools around the world. Negroponte loved telling the story about OLPC distributing tablet computers to remote villages in Ethiopia with no schools so children could teach themselves.
Then the evidence emerged. Across continents and countries, from Peru and Uruguay to Nepal, well-funded academic studies demonstrated no gain in academic achievement for OLPC students when compared with those who didn’t participate in the program. The evidence mirrored other laptop and computer handout programs in such countries as Israel and Romania, where the introduction of computers also did nothing to improve learning. Last year, a report from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that “students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes,” and technology did nothing to improve scores across subjects, and less to bridge gaps between rich and poor students. In 2014 One Laptop per Child closed its Boston headquarters and drastically cut down on staff and new programs.
OLPC’s great mistake was presuming the universal importance of a shiny imported technology in spite of the recommendations of people closer to the problem at hand.
