Yes, I fear laptops for all pupils is just populist rhetoric

By Ben Arum

The new Cabinet Secretary for Education is faced with a particularly difficult assignment. He must take a position that will contradict completely or amend a proposal made by the new Government to provide solar powered laptops to pupils joining Standard One.

The President and Deputy Pesident must sit together with their party technocrats must rethink this promise.

Having campaigned on the platform of a digital generation, offering digital solutions to our problems as opposed to the slow and moribund ways of our 50 years of underdevelopment, it is now time for all of us to find the rationale of providing advanced and sensitive tools to infants who still view every equipment as a toy.

Early childhood is a stage for developing language, basic numerical skills, management of personal affairs, and general induction into community.

Play, bonding and the initiation of the spirit of fair competition is nurtured in the pupils. Above all, the children are introduced into pedagogic authority which replaces parental authority and sibling dominance that many children leave their homes already disobeying or not trusting.

It is in early education that one gets disrobed of prejudicial obedience to the family. If you come from a poor family, you start seeing great prospects in the teacher and surrender your faith to him.

 If you come from a rich family, and sometimes feel the teacher can tell you nothing, you soon discover that the teacher can discipline you and tell off your father.

In short, early education, almost up to puberty, helps the child majorly to differentiate between manifold notions, ideas, realities and threats that it finds slowly affecting its life.  Its brain is developing fast and must be guided to pick only those things that form the basis for future orientation.

Fractions of oranges

For example, the path of a great mathematician must pass through the following stages: counting full oranges, adding fractions of oranges to form full oranges; adding mutating oranges and their decimals; and finally, he should be able to carry out computations of virtual oranges.

Ideally, he will start counting with his fingers and toes. When the oranges become too many, he will use sticks.

When the fractions become too complex, he will need calculators and then computers. Remembering my own education, I can safely assert that the normal path for the development of the mind is that it first hears, then sees and finally feels.

The good mind is first taught, then he sees the teaching and finally internalises or feels the teaching. It is obvious that computers are instruments that are more useful to minds that have felt knowledge.

Both derivative thinking and intuitive induction spring out of feeling knowledge.

The ancients taught that human beings have seven senses; animation, feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, speaking and tasting. Although these senses develop together, some combine and contribute to the early development of the preponderant sense of thinking.

I fear the introduction of a “thinking” instrument in the lives of underdeveloped minds may stunt or subvert their full development. Are we sure pupils who barely comprehend the alphabet can make gainful use of the complicated keyboard?

Are our teachers computer literate? Is it not wise to provide computers to our university and college students as we come down so that the computer becomes a desk tool from form one and not from standard one?

It is easy to conclude that the person who came up with the idea of laptops for all standard one pupils is a mercantile man; a supplier, who, guided by greed saw the bulk market available in our primary schools.

In the conspiracy are all of us; teachers and parents, who are silently praying that the computers are delivered as soon as possible so that we may benefit in one way or another.

BVR machines

I find the conspiracy complete. The government cannot backtrack in its promises, the people do not want it to backtrack and the children do not need the laptops.

It is my prediction that the laptops, like the BVR machines, will not work within the 100 days of their delivery. Then a little noise from the civil society. Some teachers will sell a number just like they sold books under the free primary education program.

Then the conscience of the nation will tell us to move on. The good intentions of our government cannot be the subject of a moral argument. 

The writer is a civil engineer.