One Laptop Per Child-Good or Bad?

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Nicholas Negroponte founded the One Laptop Per child Mission. His deeply believes this would be an exceptional process for the poorest children around the world to get an education. He believes is would be a "...joyful, self-empowerment" experience for the children and that it would bring a brighter future. He also states how getting an education should be a requirement and not a privilege. So, I've asked many people their opinions on this issue, and I have gotten so many mixed reviews! Many say, that they think it's a "...dumb idea that won't work, kids just want cartoons and Myspace..." or others that would say "...that would be great for the poverty countries, those children should have a chance to get some kind of education." However, I'm still stuck in the middle! I don't know exactly how I feel about the whole idea, I stronlgy agree with both points made by the people outside this class, also in the article "Are Celebrities Human?: OLPC", Theresa disagrees with the idea as well. In one hand I do think that those that are less fortunate around the world should have the privilage to get an education...a formal education. Having the laptop would bring extra hmph for the child to actually want to get an education. According to CNN, Rwanda had recieved a donation of laptops in a school that barely had any electricity. However, before the laptops only 50 percent of students showed up to class, but now this transformation brang in 1000 more students. Also, they are teaching their family members which I thought was a great way of family interactions, which brought me back to the presentation David, Paige and Kaitlyn did on DiMaggio. When they argued whether the internet broke or brang together a family.
In the other hand I thought of David's blog "Unemployment in the U.S.", if there isn;t enough money to keep our fellow Americans recieveing pay stubs every two
weeks, how can we possibly afford a "low cost" laptop for these children. This is
what doesn;t make sense and why it keeps me in the middle of the situation. I don't think they would use it for educational purposes only, who knows if they would into the social world of the internet? You may say "they are only kids...." but, according to one of my articles "Do you know who's really behind the screen? cont'd" children are the main targets online. If this were to completely go through, I beleive all children should be adult supervised.
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