The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program is typical Silicon Valley goofiness. The sponsors figure they can solve a bunch of Third World problems by giving every kid a laptop computer, or more accurately, a laptop shaped gadget. However, it's close enough to a real computer that
the tykes have been getting themselves in trouble:
Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.
...
"Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials," NAN said.
Now those naughty kids will be getting filters so they can get back to writing the next PC operating system (snort). My guess is that if every computer disappeared from every grade school classroom in the world, the students' reading, writing, and math abilities would jump. Well, maybe not in the USA given the way the educational establishment has managed to screw those subjects up and fill the curriculum with outrageous piffle.
