English Audio Request

Over the past 10 years technology has helped other very poor societies – via the wind-up light or through the widespread adoption in Africa, in particular, of mobile phones, even in the remotest communities – but this project is of a different order. One specific aim is to encourage social cohesion. The Rwandan government particularly wants to encourage rapid economic development by educating these children to be computer-literate – but there is also a notion that these laptops might help to vaccinate a society still in painful recovery from its genocidal past by opening up the rest of the world to a new generation.
Cavallo talks about Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist and philosopher who believed education to be "capable of saving our societies from possible [violent] collapse". He also talks of the American philosopher John Dewey, one of his heroes, who believed that only science could reliably further human good. It is an ex-student of Piaget's, Seymour Papert (a brilliant mathematician and education and technology theorist) who is the inspiration for the XO. A political refugee from apartheid South Africa, Papert fled to England, France and finally America where he became one of the founders of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (MIT).
Later Cavallo emails me a photograph. It is a black and white image from 1967. A long-haired and bearded Papert is bending over a mechanical clear plastic "turtle" controlled by a computer language written for children of his own devising.This "turtle," which children could command to draw – on paper at first and later on a video screen – was the first of Papert's Children's Machines that four decades later would morph into the XO.
What Papert has long argued is that children, in all societies, can master computing, not just their simple operation but also the writing of computer code as well. That learning process, he believed, equipped children not only for understanding computers but could transform entirely how individuals learn throughout their lives, inside and outside the classroom and, therefore, alter societies. He is a longstanding enemy of what he sees as the tyranny of formal education systems which he believes equip children only to master set syllabuses. Put simply, Papert believes that computers can enable children to learn how to learn for themselves through playful problem-solving and that this will lead to their becoming better-rounded human beings.