Computers for kiddies

I don't agree that shoving computers into schools will do anything to improve education outcomes.
However, if you want to give kids computers, what is the best way to do it?

There are two basic approaches - you give them to the suppliers of education, or you give them to the consumers. ie, you buy "pooled" computers for schools, which then sit in a dedicated classroom somewhere and get used for a few hours a day, or you get the parents to buy a laptop for their kids.

Funnily enough, the "supplier" approach seems to dominate the state sector, whilst the "consumer" approach dominates the private sector. Funny that.

If you're going to do it, I reckon the best approach is consumer driven. People are likely to get a lot more satisfaction out of a computer if they own it themselves. A privately owned car is a lot more useful and flexible than public transport (but don't try mentioning that heresy in the corridors of power). People like owning their own stuff. Don't believe me? Try sharing a single mobile phone or iPod amongst your family and friends. Civil war is generally rapidly achieved from attempting something as stupid as that.

How do you ensure that every family can afford a computer?

Kids really need a laptop - something they can lug from home to school and back again. Face it - if you want kids to become "computer literate", they are much more likely to learn about how things work from fiddling around with it in their own time. You can only learn so much in a classroom. Stuffing around on FacePlant or whatever it is called will teach them heaps more than any stuffed squid of a teacher ever will.

Did you really learn to drive via driving lessons, or did you pick up most of your skills out on the road in your own time with no instructor?

The answer is vouchers.

Laptops are not expensive any more. When I first started buying them at work, they cost around $10,000 a pop (but a PC back then also cost $4,500). Your average "corporate" laptop with lots of bells and whistles should now be under $2,000. You can buy an entry level laptop for $700. I know that because we own two of them. They don't have a lot of bells and whistles that we'll never use - they have just enough to be very useful. And at $700, they are cheap enough for us to own two. We might own three before long.

So my solution is to give families a voucher per kid every three years. The voucher should be enough to buy a laptop with some basic software that they'll use in class plus some anti-virus stuff. You can do that for about $900 if you are prepared to put up with Works instead of Office. You can do it for a bit over $1,000 if you install the Education version of Office.

The thing I like about vouchers is that people can buy a fancier laptop if they want to. Let's say you get a $1,000 voucher. If you want a $2,000 laptop, you can have it - so long as you are prepared to make up the difference. You don't have a government committee setting standards and issuing tenders and evaluating different makes and models (which are constantly changing) and having to deal with the logistics of buying hundreds of thousands of laptops per year. You simply handout vouchers and let the market do the job for you. Parents can shop where they like. They can buy an Acer or a Lenovo or an HP or whatever they like. They can buy the fanciest thing in the shop or the most basic. They can get a 40GB hard drive or an 80GB hard drive. You let them make the decisions based on the performance they want and what they can afford.

That would of course send the education beauracrats into a tailspin. If you give out vouchers for laptops and allow parents some choice, next thing you'll be handing out vouchers for schools and allow parents to choose where to send their kids based on the performance of the school and what they can afford.

It also makes people put some skin in the game. If the computers belong to the school, no one cares about them, and they take a beating. If your family owns it, I'm pretty sure most parents will make the kids take care of them. If they don't, well, they don't get another voucher and they have to pay for a new one out of their pocket. I like the idea of pushing the authority for choosing what to buy back to the families, as well as the responsibility for looking after them.

The Teachers Union would also go ballistic at it would introduce inequality into the classroom. We'd have an el-cheapo basic thing, whilst Bill next door might have something that cost 5 times as much. Bully for Bill. If his parents want to splash out on his education, let them. It's their money. I'd simply explain to Junior when he came home to complain about the paucity of expense that we forked out for his machine that he can have a cheap laptop and a two week ski holiday, or an expensive laptop and a week picking up litter at the local park during the holidays. Kids need to be taught about trade-offs and the fact that you can't have everything you want. Kids also need to be taught about value maximisation and how to evaluate different alternatives. Giving everyone the same committee-chosen machine teaches them nothing about the real world.

I also can't stand the thought of the education beauracracy being put in charge of going out to tender for laptops. They'd take forever to make a decision, probably choose a bad compromise and then not care about the consequences as it is not their money. You need to move purchasing decisions to where people care about it being their money.

I bet Kevin and his Kohorts have not thought this through. Because they are idiots that have never worked in the real world.