• Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    What happens if you drop off a thousand Motorola Xoom tablet PCs in a village with kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll have taught themselves to customize the software, reactivate disabled features and, perhaps, start down the path of learning to read.

    Even this first paragraph by the author. These kids clearly already know how to fucking read, there’s written words in the background of the photos, including stuff that looks written by a child.

    • DessertStorms@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Yeah, the whole framing is just so white-saviour/noble savage esque…

      E: and before I get a “well how are they supposed to frame it??!1” - “kids given tablets for the first time easily learn not only how to use them, but personalise them too”. Simple.

    • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      10 months ago

      whoever dropped off those tablets and wrote this article should probably try it again on North Sentinel Island. I think that’s the effect they were hoping for.

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      10 months ago

      The first bolded part, that’s just lol. But for the second, the youth literacy rate there is 55%. It’s low enough that it might not be that horrible of an assumption. But combined with the first part, yeah…

      • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        That line reads like some Boomer who has no idea how computers work. Doing what they did to those tablets required the prior ability to read.