ARAHUAY, Peru — Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.
These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can’t get enough of their XO laptops.
At breakfast, they’re already powering up the combination library-videocam-audio recorder-music maker-drawing kits. At night, they’re dozing off in front of them, if they’ve managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.
“It’s really the kind of conditions that we designed for,” Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.
Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.
In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India — and a full-court press from Intel Corp.’s more power-hungry Classmate.
But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with “mesh” technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.
Mass production began in November, and Negroponte says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by November 2008. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.
Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.
Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti and Afghanistan in early 2008 through “Give One, Get One,” a U.S.-based promotion ending Dec. 31 in which people can buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.
The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop’s transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds’ poorest kids.
“Some tell me that they don’t want to be like their parents, working in the fields,” first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates — animals without backbones.
Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.
Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.
Kevin, 9, wants to play trumpet.
Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town’s recent Fiesta de la Virgen.
“What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record,” says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.
Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this hamlet of 800 people arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins.
Arahuay’s lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.
Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the work week in fields many hours’ walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.
When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.
Peru’s head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima’s shantytowns four hours away.
It’s the best answer yet to “a global crisis of education” in which curricula have no relevance, he said. “If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won’t matter if the classroom’s walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes.”
Indeed, Arahuay’s elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school’s director.
The XOs that Peru is buying will be distributed to pupils in 9,000 elementary schools from the Pacific to the Amazon basin where a single teacher serves all grades, Becerra said.
Although Peru boasts thousands of rural satellite downlinks that provide Internet access, only about 4,000 of the schools getting XOs will be connected, said Becerra.
Negroponte says One Laptop is committed to helping Peru overcome that hurdle. Without Internet access, he believes, the program is incomplete.
Teachers will get 21/2 days of training on the laptops, Becerra said. Each machine will initially be loaded with about 100 copyright-free books. Where applicable, texts in native languages will be included, he added. The machines will also have a chat function that will let kids make faraway friends over the Internet.
Critics of the rollout have two key concerns.
The first is the ability of teachers — poorly trained and equipped to begin with — to cope with profoundly disruptive technology.
Eduardo Villanueva, a communications professor at Lima’s Catholic University, fears “a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers.”
To counter that fear, Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops, for which it is also arranging low-interest loans.
The second big concern is maintenance.
For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it.
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