The Learning Power of Children

The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC for short) has been giving tablet notebooks with solar chargers to various schools in Africa and testing the results.

They tried a new experiment in two remote Ethiopian villages where no one--adult or child--had ever seen a written word.  Delivered boxes--taped up boxes--to the villages and left them.  What happened is...well, look:

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

So the take-home lesson on human potential is this: human children are born knowing how to learn.  Learning is what humans do.  These kids are over-the-roof smart and capable; discovery learning--figuring it out for themselves, self-motivated learning--is part of our human nature.

And we're wasting every kid who--for any reason at all--doesn't learn, doesn't want to learn, is afraid to learn, isn't allowed to learn, is kept from being all he or she could be.

(copied from my post at SFF.net)