[dundee] Taylug Weekly Articles 8 - POMS

[Robert McWilliam]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 03:45:43 -0800, "Gary Short" <gary at garyshort.org>
said:
> LOL, I can see that we're not going to agree on this; I just take the
> view that if you have a multi million dollar investment to make in the
> future of kids in the developing world I'd spend it on teachers every
> time. Others would spend it on wind-up laptops; that's cool too, whatever
> floats your boat I guess.

OK one last try before giving up :)

What do you think your multimillion dollar investment is going to get
you in terms of teachers? some more quick making up of numbers: if you
can get a teacher a classroom and all the required supporting services
for $5000/year (I think I'm reaching the point of ridiculously
optimistic here) then each of your million dollars pays for the
education of *two* classes (taking 10 years of education, if you reduce
that you can obviously give more people less of an edujcation). Even
with ridiculous class sizes you're not going to get to a lot of pupils
that way. 

I'd agree that teachers arfe very useful for teaching but comparing the
quantities of each you get for the money the OLPC wins hands down. 

Sorry to go on about this but the "teachers are better than laptops"
sentiment annoyed me when it ignores how much of each we can get for the
money. 
________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam     rmcw at allmail.net    www.ormiret.com

Everything should be made as simple as possible - but no simpler.
	-- Albert Einstein