The government of India has abandoned plans to order the laptop computers being developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development labelled the $100 laptop project as “pedagogically suspect”, according to the Kaumudi newspaper, claiming that there are no proven benefits of providing all children with their own notebook computers.
“The case for giving a computer to every single child is pedagogically suspect. It may actually be detrimental to the growth of the creative and analytical abilities of the child,” Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee told a planning commission.
He added that the project is suffering from an unpredictable timeline. “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools,” said Banerjee.
“We do not think that [OLPC project leader] Nicholas Negroponte’s idea is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage and no major country is presently following this. Even inside America, there is not much enthusiasm about this.”
He concluded that India would be better off investing the funds in expanding secondary education programmes.
The OLPC project aims to build a notebook computer for children in developing nations. The idea is that computers will teach children to think in a more structured manner while allowing them to educate themselves instead of depending on teachers.
The project is led by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte. In presentations about the project, Negroponte has repeatedly made a case for providing children with notebook computers, pointing to successful projects in the west and developing nations such as Cambodia.
Production of the computers will start once five to 10 million have been ordered and paid for, according to the OLPC website.
Nigeria placed an order for one million OLPC laptops earlier this month and other nations are set to follow including Brazil and Egypt.
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