Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.
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Member since:2006-09-27
Well, I don't think much of educational systems where children are not treated as free individuals from the beginning. It's not that I'm against rules, free adults follow rules as well. But this is a digression. Children are supposed to follow stricter rules "for their own good". Do you really think there's a valid analogy between the rules that parents set for their children and the EULAs that corporations write for their users? hint: for whose good are they designed?
Freedom is a very general and loaded concept, but in this case I mean the children's freedom to own their tools. It doesn't matter what they will do in life, if computers are useful at all for their profession then computers and the software in them are some of their tools. I think it's arguably better to have lower-quality tools, or having to wait a little more for high quality tools, than growing used to tools you don't own. Many adults decide otherwise, often for pragmatic reasons, but children should not be exposed to such traps.
Member since:2007-01-22
Member since:
2006-01-02
That's BS and you know it. The reason children have rules as they grow up which are relaxed once they become older is that education must come before freedom. Human beings cannot be free in society before they learn to control themselves and integrate well. Similarly, it's far more useful to teach these children skills that are applicable to their situation such as medicine, information about the natural world, writing and communication, than it is to get them into computer programming or Free Software. Free Software is great and if that's the cheapest and most effiicent way to get the job done, then by all means go with Free Software. But if a proprietary company is donating their work and their software will allow the product to be produced cheaper and more effectively, then Free Software should take a back seat because it is far less important to the vast majority of the kids than the aforementioned skills.