I spent months doing research for a blog post about One Laptop Per Child last year, and came to a related, but more broad conclusion: it's extremely easy to reach misleading conclusions when studying novel educational methods. No strong conclusion comes without qualifiers related to culture and economics. Moreover, a shocking amount of harm has been done by people trying to apply an educational method outside of the socioeconomic context where its efficacy was proven.
There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
In OLPC's case, the remedy was a retroactive, panicked attempt at teaching teachers how to use the laptops, an effort that largely failed.
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
> i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here.
Oh yeah, they had their heads miles up their own asses. That's absolutely a major part of the story. Idealism led to hubris.
The hand crank is a big part of the story, though its role is more complicated than you might expect. It wasn't a silver bullet. Some developing nations, like Paraguay, had decent electrical infrastructure, but their OLPC deployments still went poorly due to lack of training and lack of maintenance/repair programs.
Also, it takes very basic physics to prove that the hand crank could never have been the silver bullet in the first place. My math in the essay agrees that no child-operated hand crank was ever going to be sensible.
There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.