Jim Goodnight: a laptop for every child.
Speaking to an invited audience that included European Commission’s Director-General for Education and Culture, Odile Quintin, Goodnight said that part of the solution was computers. Lots of them. He wants schools to have a computer for every child, and governments to pay them out of national budgets.
It would, said Goodnight, cost just $800 per child for a laptop, even less for a desktop machine. But the results could be dramatic.
Goodnight cited evidence from schools in North Carolina where SAS had supported the introduction of computers, and where now all the students use tablet computers. All reports and tests are done on screen, and last year every single student graduated and went to college.
Reducing drop-out rates could realise big savings for society. In the US, two-thirds of the prison population is made up of people who did not finish high school. And while it costs $6,000 a year to educate a school student, it costs $27,000 a year to maintain a prisoner.
Other savings would come in reducing the amount of remedial teaching required, because students “would have learnt first time around”.
The key thing, he said, was to prepare detailed computer-friendly curricula and to train teachers to deliver it.
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