The Federal Labor Party is trying to save its skin on education, its “last refuge”, yet this is perhaps its most vulnerable flank.
I’m a father of six with three children in high school, four next year, and I want to raise the issue of “one laptop per child”. This program, provided at vast expense to tax payers, is a farce. The only people who benefit from the program are bad teachers who are content that disruptive pupils are fully occupied playing games on their laptops and not disrupting the lesson.
I struggled with this issue myself for a while, but decided in the end that these kids needed encouragement, not diversion. Laptops in school are too often utilised as baby-sitters rather than educational aids.
But what about the issue of the actual benefits of school laptops as pedagogical aids? I have it on good authority (my own kids) that they’re redundant; they’re prone to accidental or malicious damage and they’re hardly even used for practical purposes.
What’s more, kids’ laptops are attracting new fees at a rate roughly proportional to their increasing exclusivity. It’s no longer “one laptop per child” it seems, they’re rationed out according to some arbitrary (elitist?) criteria, though it comes down to funding and a looming election.
Kids no longer use textbooks either. We are asked to pay $150 per student for virtual textbooks (on the laptop) yet my grade ten son tells me there are none.
In fact the same son tells me he wants to turn his laptop in—to dispose of it ethically—that is once he gets it back from rehab. It has a “cracked screen”, he tells me, adding that this is an exceedingly common fate due either to malicious intent or acts of God. But it’s a dust-collector anyway.
I’m writing then to ask after other people’s experience with this Labor “initiative”. I suspect I’ve barely scratched the surface of what looks to me like a scandalous waste of money that actually works against education
I might add that I’m a committed Labor supporter. But I call a spade a spade.

The supplier of the computers will make a fortune if not on the first sale on support or ancillary items also the middle man will probably arrange good commissions and kickbacks.

Another labor VOTE BUYING exercise.

Just dropped in to read but found no room to agree.
IF and some doubt exists, teachers are using them like this sack them!

What a geek is the minister in charge of education, the wrong bloke in the wrong job. Garrett once threatened to resign if he was dropped from cabinet, Gillard should have taken up his offer. Come next election I fully expect "The Rock Star" to get rolled in Kingsford-Smith. Labor have failed on education, failing to adequately fund disadvantaged schools, whilst poring millions into elitists private schools.

Paul1405 - Juliar has trouble finding money for our schools BUT gave $500m to build 2,000 Islamic “madrassahs” in Indonesia.

When a country's education model is flawed, randomly raining technology down upon it merely exacerbates the dysfunction, and probably leads to a sense of less continuity and greater confusion amongst the students.

(Just wanted to add that since we homeschool, my son had to save up for his ipad, doing a few chores during the week and banking his pocket money. It took him most of a year to save up, but the exercise in delayed gratification and the eventual reward was the best lesson he's gained from the contraption:)

Poirot,
I think he also received a valuble lesson in financial management and no doubt he will look after the thing. Well done.

Squeers my sons school tried a rental scheme for laptops last year and were so impressed by the outcomes that they are phasing it out. My son was elsewhere last year so wasn't part of it. This year it was only available to those who had been part of it last year.

My son has a laptop but before I was advised that the rental scheme was not available I'd planned to be part of rental scheme. Private devices can't connect to the school wi-fi and there were a number of other reasons which made the rental ones attractive.

Not sure what the answer is to the best way to manage access to computers. There are cheaper ways of doing PC's for those on very restricted budgets (Linux, free office products etc) but suspect they would be difficult to work through for a lot of those who are not technically literate and also leave students working with systems and software that is out of step with what they will find in the schools and corporate world.

R0bert

Never fear. The funds have run out anyway. Apparently our federal government - the generous benefactors of this program - didn't realise that computers are more like consumables than assets. They go out of date at about the same rate as the yoghurt in my fridge. When they are carted around by kids for six to eight hours a day, they are susceptible to considerable damage, too.

I think our government thought that, if they bought a laptop per kid, they'd have school IT covered for the next decade at least. Sadly, it's not the case.

As a teacher, I have seen some benefits to the laptop program. It's good to be able to walk into a classroom and have some certainty (temperamental WiFi network allowing) that students would be able to access pre-prepared work, be able to do guided internet research, be able to type formative written work and submit it for checking without handing over a mountain of notebooks ... yes, there are some benefits. My department photocopying budget has been spared quite a bit of pain, as well. But I'm not entirely sure that the benefits justify the cost. Students still need to know how to write with their hands, how to add up in their heads, how to locate and navigate a book ... computers have their place in schools, but they are not the 'magic pill' that can save our nation.

I think the problem really is Labor's enthusiasm for spending. We need a bit of tight-fistedness.
The laptops, Rudd's innovation, were to me worse than profligate. As Otokonoko says, they're not hardware in any enduring sense, and meanwhile the thousands of school computer labs around Australia, upgradeable, are left to obsolescence.
I think the whole scheme stinks too of the ideology of individualism, that every child needs a PC, like s/he once needed a slate, as if we can't own knowledge without owning something tangible like a laptop. The truth is that reliance on computers makes knowledge intangible.
There are of course always instances where a personal laptop is, ironically, a
Godsend, such as when the pupil's parents are neo-ludites, or think modern technology is the work of the Devil.
Unlike Poirot's enlightened classroom, I feel for those children cloistered in their parents' attics--metaphorically or otherwise--perversely on their knees in the name of education (more common than you might think).
They're rolling back the scheme at our high school too, RObert, reserving the privilege, for now, for those arbitrarily considered deserving.
It's another Labor mess, another spending spree to lament, as if nothing's fixable except by throwing money at it.
And that's why we need economic growth, btw, so we can keep on throwing money around for no good reason--though it also keeps the fat cats fat.
We need modest government spending and high top-end taxation, doing away with the need for growth--which is really only about profiteering, not need.
Labor spends so as to get a modicum of the wealth, but it really only exacerbates the problem. A laptop for every child was a token gesture towards equality--the servant drinking his master's claret.

What happened to Kevin's laptops ? Out of date already or did he only buy cheap crap ?

Philip,
Madrassahs are religious private schools ? Am I correct ?

individual - Generally they are for the study of the Islamic religion, they do also teach other subjects. I would class the private part as wrong in this instant they are located in villages and city's.

Squeers
So do you get the connection between what you're complaining about, and the fact that you support government control of education?

Jardine K. Jardine,
Yes, I think I get it.
Do you get the link between libertarianism and government guarantee?
One can support government control of education so long as it's answerable to what said education entails.
"Government" is an arbitrary term for centralised authority--hopefully with the mandate of the people.
Of course today there is not qualitative mandate, only quantitive, or at least that's what all governments presume.
The ideology of individualism is a nonsense, discredited in primitive times.
Your private pedagogues are preparing their acolytes for action in socialised economies, to find a living fleecing the great unwashed. I'm all for the privileged education of these brats if their intent is merely to go away and build their empires elsewhere. But there is no other game, in town or elsewhere, any more than there is for dissenters. But you have the running so stop your complaining.
There is government control of education, and then there are pirates, and pirates should be treated as outlaws.
If government was truly representative of the people their wouldn't be a problem, but it's only representative of elites. Liberal education is the great lie.

"If government was truly representative of the people their wouldn't be a problem..."

There would still be the problem whether it is more representative of the people than the people are of themselves. You know, your right to make decisions for yourself rather than have someone else make them for you on the assumption that they know better?

"...but it's only representative of elites."

Well surprise surprise.

This is exactly what Austrian theory explains, predicts and expects, so I am consistent in criticising government control of education. Your own analysis of government agrees with mine - but not with your own unjustified assumptions that government is some kind of benevolent institution of social service.

Given that it's only representative of elites, what makes you think government control of education doesn't brainwash children into an uncritical acceptance of those elites as being somehow necessary and beneficial? Why should the elites get the assistance of a government monopoly at indoctrinating the entire population, all paid for by the taxpayers? The evaluational chaos and waste you describe is the least of the problem!

Indeed given that government is only representative of elites, the assumption underlying all Labor, and most Liberal policy, - that government is some kind of institution of social service - is exactly what we should expect children will be indoctrinated into believing under government control of education, isn't it?

Since your own views on government contradicts your own political leanings, what makes you think you haven't been brainwashed by government indoctrination?

<<Unlike Poirot's enlightened classroom>> [Squeers, Thursday, 25 April 2013 6:24:34 PM]

Ah-Hah! from the very first Squeerian dissertation I read I just knew its author had to have been an old boy of the Monty-Poirot School of Physical Culture.

Jardine K. Jardine,
apologies for the delay responding, but our positions are fairly well canvassed on OLO.
I'm no fan of representative government precisely because it's not. However when you juxtapose the representation of individuals I find it just as problematic. There is an umbilical cord running between institutional life and individualism, and it's a blatant lie to insist the latter is not dependent for its bearings on the former. Representative government amounts to the surrender of democracy, but individualism is the surrender of civilisation, ergo I don't see government as "benevolent" etc., only as a necessary social mediator, be it for libertarians or socialists. Your individualism is just as dependent on the State to maintain order as socialists are on it to maintain equity.
No doubt you would prefer the law of the jungle, but the entrepreneur needs the rule of law, no?
Of course I agree that government control of education, as things stand, brainwashes children, and their parents (is this not implicit in my posts?); but the alternative is not private, intensive education (which also amounts to an exclusive, exploitative, or antisocial form of brainwashing and precipitation); rather, it is an improved social education that equips the acolyte for an involved and inclusive role in the politics of the nation and the distribution of its means of reproduction.
We are all brainwashed, initially or, sadly, in the long-term, and it is the proper business of a privileged Western life to disabuse oneself of it.
If the government brainwashed me to be critical.. It's too clever by half.

By your own admission, you're a committed supporter of government representing only elites, so obviously the government didn't brainwash you to be critical, they brainwashed you to be hypocritical; and to think it's okay to substitute slogans for critical thinking.

It's you who believe in the law of the jungle, thou haught insulting man. If you would stop endlessly recirculating your brainwashed garbled marxoid nonsense, and actually *think* for a change, you might actually learn something and stop promoting the exploitation of others while you're at it.

Jardine I totally agree with you buddy. It is the civilians that elect the government that does not support or much in favor the civilians. There should be enough engorgement in choosing a government that helps the civilians more and could understand the problems of a common person.