>Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently it's now an Android tablet?

It was a pretty huge failure. They couldn't produce a laptop as cheap as they initially wanted, power infrastructure to recharge them was just not there, and most importantly, the prime belief of "just give everyone a computer and education will magically improve" of technologists has not born out at all.

The vast majority of "technology" that got injected into classrooms has had zero impact. Your average teacher is not given the time, material, money, or experience to leverage the technology in a way that multiplies their ability to educate.

My mother is a renowned teacher in the state, since about the late 80s, and lived through both the proliferation of technology in education in general, and specifically the "MLTI" program that gave every single Maine middle school student a personal iBook laptop to use. In the 80s, she learned how to program BASIC in school. In the 90s, she used the nascent internet, before Google, to research my sister's medical condition to discover treatments and support and resources despite literal poverty and living 500 miles from the nearest hospital that even had familiarity with the problem. In the 2000s, she digitized her gradebook and started to keep in touch with parents through regular email, and learned how to use digital tools to build tests and homework assignments. During the 2010s, she had an entire corpus of digital test systems that could autogenerate completely new and distinct tests from a single click. Over COVID, she attempted to teach herself OBS to improve the production quality of her remote lessons. Despite her empirical experience with tech in education, despite her outright buy-in of new techniques to improve her teaching, despite her willingness to learn new methods, none of it really improved her ability to teach a body of students a lesson.

The vast majority of teachers in all the schools in northern Maine had less aptitude with tech than she did and barely used any of the tech, and NONE of their lessons were less useful for it. The best use of "tech" I experienced during education was ONE teacher using a shared notebook application to digitize their entire lesson into digital notes that were automatically distributed to the class in a nice way that could be referenced, and that did not educate students better than a Xerox'd handout.

Tech is simply not a force multiplier in education. It's almost entirely a farce in fact. Khan academy has probably helped a few people improve their understanding on a few topics, but it's been two decades since Ivy League colleges first offered massively open online classes, and they have not moved any needle on education, as this very article shows.

The reality is that motivated people who want to learn haven't been hurting for information access since the proliferation of public libraries. Even in my shithole, dead end rural town, we had a Carnegie library that could borrow a book on any topic from most other libraries across the country. Any book that existed could be yours within a week or so. By the 90s, digital encyclopedias were in vogue and also pretty good.

The primary difficulty in teaching children anything is motivation. You can't really teach a child that doesn't want to learn. Kids in the US want to learn less than they previously did. Part of this is that education is no longer seen as an easy way to money, with those kids instead thinking they'll just become fortnite streamers or influencers or grifters. The large cohort of children of evangelical and fundamentalist families have never had it easier to deny things taught to children either, as we are seeing an outright anti-intellectualism we haven't seen since the scopes-monkey trial. Kids see their parents diss education. Kids don't think education is important.