One Laptop Per Child: Low Cost Computers Given to Children in Developing Countries
Atlanta field technician Jeff Burton is putting the finishing touches on our story about the One Laptop Per Child program, before we feed it to New York for tonight’s Fox Report w/ Shepard Smith.
However, the City of Birmingham, AL has purchased 15,000 of the $200 “XO” laptops for use in public schools.
The story has multiple angles — technology, education, world poverty and business.
In fact, we will be turning separate versions of the story — one for tonight’s Fox Report, which focuses on why a “Third World” program has attracted the attention of educators and city officials in Birmingham. The other version of this story, which we are turning for Fox Business Network on Monday, focuses on One Laptop Per Child’s impact on the computer industry and the global economy.
done
For both stories, we interviewed Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who founded One Laptop Per Child. Click on the video to watch an extended version of his comments.
Jonathan Serrie is an Atlanta-based correspondent for FNC. He was
stationed in Macedonia during Operation Allied Force and in Uzbekistan
during Operation Enduring Freedom. 
Why are we giving foreign children computers that we haven’t even given our own children? Where I live they just cut $30 million from our schools budget. Shouldn’t we be helping our own kids before we help another country’s. America needs to stop trying to help others and help ourselves first.
How about furnishing laptops to American kids that can’t afford them before sending everything out of our country?
What makes us think we’re not living in a “third world” country?…with a dwindling number of people with any affluence, government workers with better wages than the people they supposedly serve, close to 60 million people without the ability to see a doctor, a skyrocketing illegitimacy rate, rampant illiteracy, an inflation rate of roughly 11.6% (if determined the same way they did before 1993, when they started messing with it to hide the true inflation rate), and fuel costs so high that, at least where I live, people are turning back to wood to heat their houses, it sure seems to me we’re being groomed to be a bunch of “third world” pesants…how can you blame schools for using “third world” programs to get computors into the hands of their destitute children?