One view of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program and its changing fortunes:
There has been far more outrage online over the news that the OLPC may switch to Windows from its version of the free Linux operating system than over the discovery that hardly any of the laptops, originally to be deployed in no quantities smaller than 1m a country, will ever reach the poorest children.
The collapse of the scheme illuminates the utter falsity of the hope that technology alone can lift people out of poverty. Knowledge may, but the technology that spreads knowledge best is literacy, not laptops.
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