Name: 【TED】Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on (Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on)
Uploaded: 2017-12-31T03:17:54.000Z
Duration: 16 min 34 s
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Past simple

Most people don't know that when I went to high school in this country --

I applied for university at a time when I was convinced

To-infinitive

I was going to be an artist and be a sculptor.

And I came from a very privileged background. I was very lucky.

My family was wealthy, and my father believed in one thing,

and that was to give us all as much education as we wanted.

And I announced I wanted to be a sculptor in Paris.

And he was a clever man. He sort of said,

"Well, that's OK, but you've done very well in your math SATs."

In fact, I'd got an 800. And he thought I did very well -- and I did, too -- in the arts:

And he said "If you go to MIT," to which I had been given early admission,

"I will pay for every year you're at MIT,

in graduate or undergraduate -- as much as you want --

I will pay for an equal number of years for you to live in Paris."

And I thought that was the best deal in town, so I accepted it immediately.

And I decided that if I was good in art, and I was good in mathematics,

I'd study architecture, which was the blending of the two.

I went and told my headmaster that, at prep school.

And I said to him what I was doing, that I was going to go study architecture

because it was art and mathematics put together.

He said to me something that just went completely over my head.

He said, "You know, I like grey suits, and I like pin-striped suits,

but I don't like grey pin-striped suits."

And I thought, "What a turkey this guy is," and I went off to MIT.

I studied architecture, then did a second degree in architecture,

and then actually quickly realized that it wasn't architecture.

That really, the mixing of art and science was computers,

and that that really was the place to bring both, and enjoyed a career doing that.

And probably, if I were to fill out Jim Citrin's scale,

I'd put 100 percent on the side of the equation

where you spend time making it possible for others to be creative.

And after doing this for a long time, and the Media Lab passing the baton on,

I thought, "Well, maybe it's time for me to do a project.

Something that would be important, but also something

that would take advantage of all of these privileges that one had."

And in the case of the Media Lab, knowing a lot of people,

knowing people who were either executives or wealthy,

and also not having, in my own case, a career to worry about anymore.

Didn't have to worry about earning money.

Didn't have to worry about what people thought about me.

And I said, "Boy, let's really do something that takes advantage of all these features,"

and thought that if we could address education, by leveraging the children,

and bringing to the world the access of the computers,

that that was really the thing we should do.

Never shown this picture before, and probably going to be sued for it.

It's taken at three o'clock in the morning, without the permission of the company.

It's about two weeks old. There they are, folks.

If you look at the picture, you'll see they're stacked up.

This is one of the conveyor belts with the thing going by,

What happens is, they burn into flash memory the software,

But you've got to have the thing moving on the assembly line, because it's constant.

So they go around in this loop, which is why you see them up there.

So this was great for us because it was a real turning point. But it goes back.

This picture was taken in 1982, just before the IBM PC was even announced.

Seymour Papert and I were bringing computers to schools

and developing nations at a time when it was way ahead of itself.

But one thing we learned was that these kids can absolutely jump into it

And when people tell me, "Who's going to teach the teachers to teach the kids?"

I say to myself, "What planet do you come from?"

Okay, there's not a person in this room -- I don't care how techie you are --

there's not a person in this room that doesn't give their laptop or cell phone to a kid

We all need help, even those of us who are very seasoned.

This picture of Seymour -- 25 years ago. Seymour made a very simple

observation in 1968, and then basically presented it in 1970 --

April 11 to be precise -- called "Teaching Children Thinking."

What he observed was that kids who write computer programs

understand things differently, and when they debug the programs,

they come the closest to learning about learning.

That was very important, and in some sense, we've lost that.

if there's anything I hope this brings back, it's programming to kids.

It's really important. Using applications is OK,

but programming is absolutely fundamental.

This is being launched with three languages in it: Squeak, Logo, and

a third, that I've never even seen before.

The point being, this is going to be very, very intensive on the programming side.

This photograph is very important because it's much later.

This is in the early 2000s. My son, Dimitri -- who's here,

many of you know Dimitri -- went to Cambodia, set up this school

that we had built, just as the school connected it to the Internet.

And these kids had their laptops. But it was really what spirited this,

plus the influence of Joe and others. We started One Laptop per Child.

This is the same village in Cambodia, just a couple of months ago.

These kids are real pros. There were just 7,000 machines out there

being tested by kids. Being a nonprofit is absolutely fundamental.

Everybody advised me not to be a nonprofit, but they were all wrong.

And the reason being a nonprofit is important is actually twofold.

There are many reasons, but the two that merit the little bit of time is:

one, the clarity of purpose is there. The moral purpose is clear.

I can see any head of state, any executive I want, at any time, because

I'm not selling laptops. OK? I have no shareholders.

Whether we sell, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

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【TED】Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on (Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on)

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