Lev Gonick: Unrealistic

Lev Gonick is CWRU's vice-president of IT. Lev Gonick has a blog. Yesterday, he proposed an idea wherein the Cleveland public school system would be magically revitalized if someone could just deliver 100,000 laptops to the city for $99 a pop. He goes on to describe what this $99 laptop will have to do, but he doesn't go into a lot of detail about how having a laptop is going to help the school system. He leaves it merely at mentioning it "will provide every kid in Cleveland with not only the device but also the communication and software infrastructure to develop, sustain, and advance the informal learning opportunities for young people."

Giving cheap computers to children won't educate them in anything other than how to play Quake III and download pornography from the Internet. The biggest problem facing Cleveland's schools isn't a lack of computers. It's that there is an enormous population of blue-collar working families producing blue-collar working clones of themselves, and there is no real interest in educating them first. As soon as families start caring about what their kids do all day, this thing is going to fix itself, and it's exactly this kind of "let's buy them something" attitude which is going to hurt everybody in the pocketbook and help no one in the end. It is faster and easier to just get them some vo-tech training and get them working, and that's the attitude a lot of people have taken. In a lot of ways, Cleveland is like my old high school: being smart is problematic so put down the book, Einstein, and go watch some football.

The $99 laptop is a great idea in terms of making cheap electronics for people who want the technology but don't have a lot of money. Such a laptop would be absolutely wasted on Cleveland until the community reconsiders its attitude towards learning and actually begins to want to change. Foster that want for technology first, then provide it. Anything else is just going to cost me money and I resent that.