Thailand Nixes One Laptop Per Child

Thailand Nixes One Laptop Per Child:
A September coup effectively ended the career of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister whose cabinet had pledged to buy 250,000 of Mr. Negroponte’s $100 laptops, according to The Nation, a Bangkok newspaper. Thailand’s new administration now says it has no interest in the project, which would have provided all of the nation’s primary-school students with the low-cost machines.

“We will not focus too much on technology and materials,” said Wijit Srisaarn, Thailand’s education minister, this week. “We will focus on substance.”

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Personally, I think they need some technology and materials too. Substance is a problem because it is almost always political. Access to knowledge, at least cosmopolitan knowledge, requires some infrastructure and materials. It does not require OLPC though.