I have long been skeptical of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project. Not because I think selling cheap computers to poor people is a bad idea — I think that’s a brilliant idea. But because Negroponte’s non-profit whines endlessly that poor people don’t buy it, that poor governments won’t buy it for them, and that other companies have the temerity to try to sell competing products for profit. As if that makes a cheap laptop any less valuable.

His protest went something along the lines of: it’s not about the kit, it’s about education, and only the pure-of-heart, i.e. we, care about that. Intel and Asus and all those corporate scumbags are just trying to undermine my noble vision and prevent me reaching economies of scale.

Now, one ex-employee is calling Negroponte’s bluff. When Ivan Krstić resigned, he said only that, “OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project.”

But this past week, he explained just how drastic that change really was. In a long blog post mourning the faded glory of the OLPC, Krstić writes that the project is all about the kit, after all. It’s not about education. It’s about selling lots of cheap laptops. Negroponte couldn’t beat the corporate scumbags, so he’s joining them under the cover of his noble vision.

Quotes El Reg:

“I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward,” writes Krstić.

“Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work.”

Now perhaps Krstić is exaggerating. Perhaps he’s just appalled that the project backtracked on a “clarification” made last year, and just did a deal to offer Windows on the machine, with Negroponte going so far as calling it “key to the OLPC philosophy”.

I can see how this might annoy people involved with the open-source project. Maybe he’s just a bitter liar with an axe to grind. But his story confirms, in uncanny fashion, what I thought I read between Negroponte’s lines last year.

If you’re going to diss the profit motive, have the courage of your convictions, and the honesty or your vision. If a not-for-profit can’t compete with for-profit companies, it clearly isn’t delivering anything anyone needs or cares about. Which means that it only swindles cash out of the gullible with sweet-sounding lies, and exploits the poor to do so. OLPC wouldn’t be the first non-profit to demonstrate why, for all their noble intentions, so few deliver on the reasonable expectations of trusting donors and needy beneficiaries.

Hey kids, how’s it feel to be unpaid advertising execs for Negroponte’s neo-colonialist ego trip?

It may be fashionable to sneer at dumb Americans, but it seems something is amiss in British education too. It is producing the sort of intellectual midgetry that, were it able to read, would file this book in the fiction section:

A classical schoolmaster might have responded: “This is the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put,” and launch into a pedantic discussion about whether that quotation is both accurate and correctly attributed.

It would hardly occur to him to take the error seriously, and point out that Winston Spencer Churchill, a storied figure who was once voted the greatest Briton ever and to whom an improbable wealth of fictional feats and witticisms were attributed, was no storybook character.

Yet this is what 23% of Britons believe. And how do you think they might classify the following?

You guessed it. A staggering 58% would look for this character on the history or biography shelf, knowing full well that Sherlock Holmes and his dear Dr Watson inhabited 221B Baker Street in the late 19th century.

These are among the dispiriting results of a survey of 3 000 Britons, commissioned by UKTV Gold.

Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, was dismissed as fiction by a quarter of respondents. Presumably they think the Crimean War was just a setting for a Tennyson poem. After all, who’s so stupid they think a real fellow named Cardigan would charge a real place called Balaclava? Duh!

Almost half thought Richard Cœur de Lion (King Richard I of England, Richard the Lionheart) was a fictional knight and monarch, famous as a character in the fantasy stories of the Crusades.

Unlike King Arthur, who was real, say two thirds of Britons. Everyone knows he lived at Camelot, had a sword named Excalibur, and used to sit at a round table with Queen Guinevere, giving knightley orders to his buddies Gawain and Galahad and her buddy Lancelot.
James Bigglesworth, the ace pilot and hero of the British Empire affectionately known as “Biggles”, was history, according to a third of survey victims. Ninety-eight paperbacks’ worth of genuine history every kid should learn.

Robin Hood? Real, lived in Sherwood Forest, robbed the rich to give to the poor, say half of Britons. The Mona Lisa? A historical figure, a third of them think. Eleanor Rigby? Yup, she’s real too, reckon almost half of the respondents.

Reports UKTV Gold: “Over three quarters of the nation (77%) admitted to no longer reading history books, or watching historical programmes on television (61%).”

You don’t say?

There’s an interesting observation by Naledi Pandor, our education minister, in this story about the declining pass rate for matrics. The article notes that pass rates across the country have declined, year-on-year, but on a growing base. “The national pass rate this year is 65.2 percent compared to 66.5 percent last year, but 368 217 passed Grade 12 this year, a huge increase from the 272 488 who passed in 1998,” the story says.

“I find it strange that, despite the fact that more children have passed, we say we have done badly this year,” it quotes Pandor, in response.

But wait a second. The pass rate compares 2007 with 2006, while the matric population compares 2007 with 1998. This is a problem. So let’s complete the comparison. In 1998, the pass rate was only 51%. By that measure, 2007 is considerably better than 1998 in both absolute and relative terms, and shows an increase in the number of full-time students from 534 290 to 564 750. I couldn’t find the number of students who sat the 2006 exams, but approximate numbers in the media suggest a small improvement (of about 2 500, or 0.7%) in absolute numbers of matric passes between 2006 and 2007, despite the decline in the pass rate.

I’m no fan of our lengthy, superfluous and failing experiment in “outcomes-based education”. The pass rate should concern us, and the fact that it declined in the last three years is troubling. So, even more significantly, should matric standards. However, if schools are reaching more kids that previously didn’t go to school, perhaps the decline in pass rate isn’t indicative of declining quality of education. As long as it isn’t an excuse for failing to take the overall pass rate seriously, or a cover for a decline in matric standards, we should probably concede that Pandor’s department has achieved at least one thing: increasing the absolute number of successful matriculants South Africa produces.

Reaching any further conclusions, whether positive or negative, requires more complete data. If anyone knows where I can find such data, send me a link. I’d be interested to spend some time on it.

Here’s news, via Yahoo:

Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of auroras borealis, the spectacular color displays seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

This is just weird. I grew up with a huge world atlas published in 1972. Before the actual maps, all of which came in in several varieties to illustrate political, commercial, geographical and natural features of the earth, it contained lots of useful information on geography, ecology, astronomy, the environment (yup, environmental pollution was a major chapter even then), and demographics. It was a staple of my general knowledge education as a child.

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“Ah heard a Turkey, but ah never heard a Hungry.”

I’d say she’d have a great career in modelling ahead of her, but I wouldn’t want to insult Miss South Carolina.

With those immortal words, Dirty Harry Callahan confronts a scumbag with a gun of some size (”Freeze, cop! Now, left hand, pull out your gun. … My, that’s a big one!”). It is a movie classic. It makes you grin with a deep sense of sympathetic satisfaction.

Why? It’s horribly violent, is it not? Would you let your kids see ol’ Clint deliver sweet extra-judicial justice through the barrel of a .44? If not, why not?

I can’t help thinking that we used to handle violent behaviour in children far more elegantly than we appear to do today. In the old days, violence was simply punished, often with moderate violence. Usually, it just became a non-issue.

Today, we have zero tolerance school policies. Kids get suspended for even talking about violence, or drawing stick figures with guns. We have films rated inappropriate for children not only because of sex, nudity and bloody extremes, but for common violence, language and all manner of prejudice.

We’re extending the repressive psychology of taboos. Did it work for sex? Weren’t the free love generation exactly the kids who grew up when prudes and censors were all over the media industry? And with our conservative nanny approach to violence in the media, do we have any less violence among children today? Do we have less bullying?

I don’t know, but I can’t remember any school stabbings or shootings when I was young. These days, they’re regular tabloid fare.

Ever thought that violence may, in fact, be quite normal? When do you react violently and hit the keyboard? When you’re frustrated, and have exhausted rational options of dealing with a problem, not so? Wouldn’t the same logic go for violence in children? Wouldn’t they succumb to violent outbursts when they’re unable to deal rationally with problems? Yet we keep getting told that violence in the media — films, computer games, news bulletins — is what causes violent behaviour. That it somehow teaches children that violence is okay. This simply doesn’t make sense to me.

What makes far more sense to me is research described in Scientific American, which suggests what most parents probably know already, but some no doubt will not admit about their little angels: violent behaviour in children is perfectly normal. It is to be expected, as a natural expression of frustration when they struggle to communicate, or are unable to affect their circumstances through rational action. Proclivity to aggression varies not by what kids see on television, but by their genetic makeup, early development and social skills.

Moralistic and over-protective policies, whether imposed by parents on their children, teachers on their pupils, or governments on their citizens, not only constitute a dangerous infraction against individual liberty, but they’re probably counter-productive too.

When they told me I was too young to see Year of the Dragon, they should have known they’d only provoke a violent reaction.

(Hat tip: Jonathan Davis.)

Describing parts of Al Gore’s global brainwashing film, An Inconvenient Truth, as “alarmist”, a judge managed to find nine insupportable statements in the Oscar-winning jeremiad. He was ruling in a case brought to prevent its screening in British secondary schools. The case alleges the film is unfit for schools for being politically partisan, for containing serious scientific inaccuracies, and for being full of “sentimental mush”. Stewart Dimmock, the school governor who brought the case, said: “It’s a political shockumentary, it’s not a scientific documentary.”

According to the BBC, among the errors the defence could not explain were:

• Mr Gore’s assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. The judge said this was “distinctly alarmist” and it was common ground that if Greenland’s ice melted it would release this amount of water — “but only after, and over, millennia”.
• Mr Gore’s assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming — the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.
• Mr Gore’s reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned “swimming long distances — up to 60 miles — to find the ice”. The judge said: “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.”

The judge did call the film “broadly accurate”, and ruled that subject to suitable warnings and guidance notes to provide balance it can be shown in schools. But then, that goes for a lot of fiction.

Khaya, a South African comedian, does some retakes of Caitlin Upton’s infamous flubbed answer. It’s all in the delivery, he reckons.

Hat tip: SA Rocks.

This babe gets it. She’s going to edgercate America and get everyone a map and help South Africa and Eyeraq and stuff. At least, I think that’s what she said. She speaks a little high-faluting for me, but then, I’m not as smart as Miss South Carolina.

Update: Here’s a transcript of the clip:

Aimee Teegarden: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps. And I believe that our education… like such as in South Africa, and the Iraq, everywhere like, such as… and I believe that they should… our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or, or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

Compere: Thank you very much, South Carolina.

Update: I thought it might be nice to follow on from Cherryflava’s idea, and create a Facebook group for South Africans to show their appreciation for Miss South Carolina’s efforts in getting our little country on the map in the great U.S. of A.

I never did continue with history at school, after the ninth grade. It bored me senseless. I remember mostly endless repetitions of the colonial history of South Africa, the Zulu Wars and the Great Trek. It was with some surprise that I found myself reading more and more history as I grew older, however. Why, then, the disinterest as a kid? Was it just because of the parochial scope of Apartheid education? Or was there some other reason history seemed dead and insignificant?

Sheryl Longin has a theory:

I wonder if we aren’t using a hopelessly irrelevant, archaic framework to teach a subject that is absolutely vital to our children if we care about the future of the modern world. How about basing primary school history education on the evolution of the material, of inventions, of progress? From the evolution of toilet paper will come a thousand other history lessons, touching on everything from economics to politics to religion. And those lessons will be remembered, because they will be answering questions that children (and adults) naturally have.

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Economics, that is. And free market economics, at that.

A national test given to high school kids in the US came back with some surprising results. According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, more than half believe that poverty is best reduced by economic growth - not government intervention. Given multiple choices and a supply curve chart, a plurality also believed that setting a price floor on chocolate would cause a chocolate surplus. Would these kids reach the same, logical conclusion if the test replaced the term “chocolate” with “labour”?

While about half of the kids fail at science and history, almost 80% passed the economics section of the test. That’s a pleasant surprise, for a non-mandatory subject. Where do they get this knowledge? Surely not from the media? Could it be (gasp) common sense?

The Wall Street Journal suggests a few politicians might like to take the test themselves. I’m thinking perhaps Congressional approval ratings lower than even those of George W Bush don’t need yet another knock.

Anyone remember Pik Botha? He’s the guy who was driven to drink as Apartheid’s long-serving foreign minister, because while he got a glimpse of reality while hobnobbing in foreign capitals with Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the rest of white-ruled South Africa was growing ever more backwards and isolated. He was a good guy. PW Botha ordered him placed under surveillance and military intelligence didn’t trust him, so he must have been okay.

Like a ghost from the past, he recently resurfaced.

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