Teachers

Thursday 1 November 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

Can someone explain to me why we need teachers who have unions that insist the only way to teach children is by spending ever increasing amounts of money (despite our currently spending more money per student than ever before)? Dvice:

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

[. . .]

This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don’t even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.

Completely illiterate children teaching themselves and their equally illiterate parents to read all on their own. No teachers, or huge sums of money, necessary. Wonderful.

2012-11-01  »  madlibertarianguy