Oh, its no surprise. John C. Dvorak is ranting and raving again, this time about how useless and pointless Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child intiative is. It is, in fact cruel, according to him. How crass and naive we must be to think that giving a laptop to a starving child will miraculously save his or her poor life. You know, John. You’re right. A laptop won’t save a child’s life. It won’t feed them. If they are starving when they get the laptop, they will still die if they don’t get any food.

By the same token, a truckload of rice won’t educate them, either. It won’t teach them how to farm or read or give them weather information. In fact, deliveries of rice merely teaches them about loss and dependence. They don’t get fed all the time because there’s not enough to go around and they just wait for the food to come because they don’t have to do anything to get it. Deliveries of such foodstuffs to the hundreds of thousands of poor villages around the world teach the truly starving how to use crutches.

What this teaches us, the ones who can feed ourselves when we want to (and dive headlong into morbid obesity), is that there are far more than one simple thing we need to do to fix the world’s hunger problem. Providing massive shipments of rice to the hungry is certainly one important thing we can do, and we do it. Your contributions, John, have added to that. Now, however, we have a new direction we can go in to further improve the lives of these people. Education is one of the most complicated problems to solve and the OLPC directly addresses that one issue.

Tell me, John. If its so hard to feed these people how easy could it possibly be to educate them. Is it as easy to build a school, provide teachers, print and deliver text books (in various different languages), provide daily lunches, define local, regional, and state laws regarding village and school safety (think raiders and thieving warlords), eliminate war and conflict, and get ultra-rich people to give away all of their money as it is to drop off a bag of rice?

The real slap in the face of these destitute peoples is the bag of rice, John. Who decides how much rice goes where? Will there be enough to go around? Who gets fed? Who gets left to die of starvation? Who gets to say which poor villages even see deliveries or even which countries poor benefits from such programs? Someone once said that to give a man a fish feeds him for a day, but to teach him to fish is to feed him for a lifetime. The OLPC XO-1 is that teacher where, otherwise, there would be none.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: media, news, social