Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work"

I reached the article limit, so I could only read this, and I disagree.

I live in Brazil and my wife works in a big NGO focused on education. She visits schools in poor regions all over the country. Her current understanding is that she sees no evidence that technology helps at all. And the NGO piloted lots of tech initiatives on lots of schools.

"Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work"

The first part is definitely true, the second one not so much.

What seems to make a difference is a prepared and motivated school principal.

EDIT:

I just read the whole article (thanks to ivm letting me know about Outline).

The title is kind of clickbaity. Big programs, with a lot good things going on, and they focus on the small part that use tablets and I don't think it is even an absolute necessity.

"The coach-and-tablet element is just one part. A curriculum based on synthetic phonics (widely used in developed-country schools) has been designed and 23m books distributed, along with detailed lesson plans to make life easier for teachers. But the technology is crucial to supporting them and providing their bosses with data about their performance."

It is "crucial" for a small part of the program with good results.

They at least acknowledge some high profile programs that did not work and go on to share a few other few and specific cases that are very interesting and explain how tech could indeed help.

I still think it overrates the tech part, but looks like the classic case where the journalist writes a more down to earth article and the editor adds a exagerated title.

Perhaps the rest of the article would have improved my opinion of it, but at the moment it sounds like Yet Another Rich Westerner trying to solve the Third World's problems with technology, plenty of money, and not a clue of what's going on.

I've lived in a Third World country in Africa for half of my life and am often astounded by the naivete of some (especially tech-based) development schemes. Recently friends of mine were in contact with a Western philanthropist who donated $10 000 to buy laptops for a village school. He came out twice for a few days, chose the school and had the laptops shipped. The problem? The school he chose didn't have any teacher who knew how to use a computer. The next teacher who did lived ~20km away... But of course the philanthropist ignored every piece of advice given him by the people on the ground, just to become upset when, six months later, he realized that his grand scheme wasn't working out.

He is not alone. Projects like these sound fantastic, thought out in a comfortable suburban home in America, but all too often they utterly ignore reality. The reality is that in rural areas here an Internet connection is not something you can take for granted (though this is rapidly improving), electricity is unreliable or completely absent, and an extreme climate and all-permeating dust play havoc with electronics. And that is before you consider social problems like rampant thievery.

Education is one of the most important and urgent areas for development, and we do need to do a lot more than we are right now. But to think that computers can magically solve the problems we have is just another typical case of Silicon Valley Syndrome - believing that social problems can be solved with technology. Yet, the most successful development projects I know all have a few things in common: they work with people, they work with what's there, and they work in the long term. There is no silver bullet.

I have no doubt that having a human coach is a big win and results in better outcomes, if you get a good one. One of the opportunities the tech can present is the ability to augment a good coach so that they can effectively help hundreds more students. I bet some teachers/coaches are bad enough that software without a coach would be superior.

One thing the tech industry has proven to be great at is getting users addicted to things, I have to wonder, why aren't we seeing apps that get kids addicted to something they actually learn from? (My best guess is there just isn't enough money in the space to attract the best tech talent.)

No disrespect intended to teachers, but a lot of times when they get involved in the discussion they keep going back to "that's why you need to have a good teacher who teaches correctly," and that's completely true, but the problem is, there aren't enough of them, and there may never be.

To me it always feels like there's a lot of entrenched and regressive thinking in this discussion, well the reality is that Facebook owns the attention of millions of kids in the developing world now. The educators, the NGOs, etc. already lost the war. The kids are Facebooking instead of doing their homework. These people consistently applied the tech in dumb ways and Facebook won because they were smart. This lesson is a bitter pill but it needs to be swallowed.

I work in EdTech in Mexico and I totally agree.

What makes a difference are prepared and motivated principals but also teachers, even in expensive private schools which are usually our customers.

Technology in the classroom is even negative for younger kids, and for teenagers it generally doesn't make much of a difference over pen and paper unless the teacher understands the benefits of the medium.

As someone who has been working in EdTech for a couple of years and was motivated to make learning better, this revelation has been quite demotivating.

I haven't spent time in the third world but I think it is safe to say the technology that does them the most good is infrastructure whether it is ancient like sewers or new like cellphone first deployment.

I think tablets are largely something for the far end of the bell curve - good for autodidacts who would seek out new things when given the means. Most people don't spend their frer time say looking up obscure history and quantum physics but those who do can be enriched by it.

There are smart people everywhere - I had a professor who grew up in the third world and disassembled and reassembled electronics from a young age. My deceased grandfather had a middle school education but sure could learn - despite working as a plasterer he managed to learn quite a bit of completely unrelated trades untaught, perspective in wood art, and write an eloquent sermon about his time in the Pacific theater when he accidentally made a more generous than expected donation in the dark - giving a $20 bill which is about $300 today and worth even more to the natives. It would have fit in as a chapter of a quality novel perectly.

Also, not all _"third world"_ are equal. Brazil, Senegal and India, to take three semi-random examples, are very different in its structure.

And inside a country, there is also a lot of inequality. I am from Brazil and got basically the best education money can buy (excluding fancy, elitist schools for millionaires).

Buying the tablet is easier, if you have the money. But just how long do you think it's going to last in that kind of environment? Turning the school around is a thousand times harder - but if you manage, you're going to impact more than a thousand times more students than you would with one lousy tablet.

> Poor kids need a way to learn skills that are in demand.

In the context they live in, the skills that are in demand are agriculture and reading - not the current fad in web frameworks.

I also made very clear that there is lack of evidence that technology (as in computers in the classroom) help so far. I never said I am against trying to revolutionize the education with tech, I just said it isn't revolutionizing right now, as the article implies.

You are fighting an idealized enemy here, not debating with me. You are arguing to inexistent arguments that would make you feel good about your own strong ideas. Not actually bothering to understand my point.

And acusing my wife of corruption or unethical behavior was just shitty.

What studies? Help me out here. I'm trying to understand how having high quality instructions are harmful to people who can't afford quality teachers.

> I also made very clear that there is lack of evidence that technology (as in computers in the classroom) help so far.

What about the evidence in the article? Did you read it? What evidence do you have?

> Not actually bothering to understand my point.

That your wife is some authority on education and thinks technology is bad. Profound.

> And acusing my wife of corruption or unethical behavior was just shitty.

Didn't say that. But at some point "cancer awareness" organizations exist to keep their members employed and not actually curing cancer. Human nature and all that.

But you're right we do take power for granted but I think what I found most lacking during power outages were not the light source but access to Internet. Just being able to lookup something really quick while you're learning is much more efficient than waiting the next day to ask your teacher to answer it, which is hit/miss sometimes.

It took ages. Of course all of that can be done almost instantly with webpages. Although now I'm drowning in broweser tabs.

If someone thinks that education is the teacher job and parents should not do anything I disagree, at least not in regular schools where a teacher could have up to 25 students in a classroom.

I have no words when I think at a teacher with 60 students, this must be so exhausting.

Add Outline.com/ before the URL, like:

https://outline.com/https://www.economist.com/international/...

I work in EdTech in Brazil and can confirm this.

The same logic, at its extreme would suggest you could replace parents with sophisticated tooling and come out with children that are just as well developed and ready to contribute to society in meaningful ways.

Granted that also requires a good teacher but the payoff is so high compared to just having text or video in front of you.

Standing at a whiteboard thinking out loud with an instructor or peer has always lead to my deepest understanding / biggest breakthroughs as far as understanding a concept goes.

Humans are social animals and we learn really well that way.

This is absolutely correct! Information technology is in no way, shape, form, or manner an adequate replacement for a skilled, educated, professional, and engaged teacher and a supportive community.

It may be worth considering that tools can provide some value when teachers have no idea what they're supposed to be teaching... or even are entirely absent!

It's important to recognize that using technology to aid in the educational process does not have to mean handing kids iPads and hoping for the best. While by no means a substitute for a teacher performing to reasonable standards, tools can be a wonderful investment in situations where the education system cannot meet those standards.

Until i arrived in the West, i didn't realize what's possible with the collaborative approach instead of competing against each other.

In west, average people were teaming up and achieving better result as a group than couple of sharp kids in my country where they spent a lot of effort killing competition.

This is my experience, excuse if it's full of bias.

The thing that I don't think most of these countries realize is, if you've spent an entire child's life teaching them to compete with others, and making that a ticket to their success, all you do is enable that behavior and it becomes a habit.

I've met many foreigners working in the West who strongly believe that because they were top performers academically in their countries they are better than everyone and it shows through in arrogance much more frequently than people who we in the West might consider "top performers". What I like about many Western education systems is the emphasis on collaboration. Some Western countries don't have a national entrance exam and that's really for the best. You create a funnel of homogeneity in your academic system by using that as your qualifying metric without much thought to anything else and your economic development persists on that path with those deemed to be top performers looking down on their fellow citizen.

Of course, I do not want to over generalize. This is not ALWAYS the case and I've also met many foreigners who are humble and amazing to work with and Westerners who are arrogant and dismissive.

I also have no idea what do you mean by killing the competition, are children sabotaging each other somehow ?2

As an example of collaboration we were a group a students that we were solving independently math problems and next day we were helping each other on the hard ones that some could not solve, the ones that nobody could solve we would ask the teacher and he was very happy that we were asking, he helped us and then give us a new list of problems to solve. This worked because we were doing this for fun and we were not forced into it, if someone would have been forced into it he could just copy the solution and done.

I also always like to think about Dijkstra and his opinion on technology vs paper for teaching. He seemed to avoid it's use when it replaced a more personal teaching style but he also seems to be a pioneer in distance learning[1]. I think a lot of people could learn a lot from him.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX3URhx6i2E

Would a wrench help your education? If you take it out on the playground and throw is around it wasn't useful. If you leave it in the closet it wasn't useful. If you use it to cut the clay for your art project it was useful but you could have done better. If you use it to rebuild and engine thus learning how to do a career it was useful - how useful depends on if you actually want to be a mechanic.

A computer is a tool, just like a wrench. You can use it to play games and get no use. They can gather dust and be useless. They can however open a world of information in some cases this can be a big difference.

Is it at all reasonable to use units of GDP to compare salaries? That doesn’t seem right to me. The US GDP per capita in USD is about $60k. The Ethiopia GDP per capita in USD is less than $800. The only way to claim that teachers are “remarkably well-paid” by using units of GDP, while in reality 7 * GDP / person in Ethiopia (about $5,400 per year) is not enough to buy food or pay rent.

If the cost of living in Ethiopia were 1% of the cost of living in the US, then teachers would be better off. But the cost of living there is only slightly lower, so teachers’ buying power there is a tiny fraction of what it is here. They’re getting a lot less than our minimum wage in relative dollars.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...

In India, teachers are paid very handsomely when compared to other disciplines (~ Rs. 35000/month for fresh grad, after 7th pay commission). I and my brother grew up in a very high cost of living part of India, with my parents making a similar total wage and life was just fine. We rarely ate out (but my mom is a fabulous cook), nor went on vacation or splurged on fancy gadgets and toys, but the basics were in very much in place. Good nutritious food, large enough 2 bedroom house, decent schooling, working computer, internet access, all utilities, all while staying well groomed and growing up happy. In lower COL areas, it may even be possible to live with a bit more luxury than we did growing up.

Cost of living calculations are misleading. The biggest expenses are rent, transportation and food. Those 3 much much cheaper in poor countries. ( joint families, public transport and dirt cheap food)

Cultural traditions enable a cheaper lifestyle too. Retired Grand-parents take care of children and help with household tasks, so don't need to pay for day care and outside food. Adults usually stay with parents and slowly take over as head of family, instead of paying rent or needing to go in debt to buy a house upfront.

> They’re getting a lot less than our minimum wage in relative dollars.

Dunno about Ethiopia, but when compared to India, numbeo says Mumbai is 5 times cheaper than Boston. I am making ~10 times (for 1 person) more than what my parents made (for a family of 4) and QOL is not much different. I can afford fancier gadgets and a lot more fast food. But, human services like house cleaning, home cooks or a domestic help are waaaaay out side my pay grade, while my Indians making ~20 times less can afford some of those.

The basics here in the US : housing, transportation and good food are pretty expensive in the US.

I can totally agree, but using isn’t GDP units more misleading since GDP inherently reflects neither income nor cost of living?

> The biggest expenses are rent, transportation and food. Those 3 much much cheaper in poor countries. ( joint families, public transport and dirt cheap food)

Totally, the relative costs for various things I would expect to be different in different countries. But I don’t understand why that invalidates cost of living as a metric. It should be an absolute number that accounts for locally adjusted costs. I expect the local cost of living to account for whatever the normal average costs are for rent & food, regardless of how that compares to other countries.

Of course there are a lot of problems comparing costs in the US to India or Ethiopia. But isn’t looking at what the average person makes relative to what the average person has to pay to live there a lot more relevant than the country’s GDP?

> Mumbai is 5 times cheaper than Boston. I am making ~10 times (for 1 person) more than what my parents made (for a family of 4) and QOL is not much different.

Right, exactly. You’re only making in relative terms 2x more, not 10x. And not all services scale the same way. Hiring human services in the US is relatively much more expensive.

That’s all expected and agrees with what I’m saying. I don’t see how any of this supports GDP per capita as a QOL metric. Maybe the PPP adjusted metic like @nabla9 suggests, in which case the teacher pay factor in Ethiopia is 2.5x compared to the US, not 7x.

My bad, I should have clarified.

I was trying to make a point about teaching being a relatively well paid job in (in this case) my home country of India and that thinking of COL or QOL in simple terms of scalar multiples is not all that helpful.

That being said, your other point totally holds. GDP is 100%, a flimsy metric to gauge QOL. Also, India-US disparity may be closer to 7-8x, but in the Ethiopia-US case it appears to be closer to 60-70x.

You correct, that 800$/year is a laughable income to live any kind of life, and no difference in GDPs or cost of products is going to make up for such a massive difference in wealth. This is a country living almost entirely in poverty, and earning a standard deviation for two more than the median would still leave one in crippling poverty.

GDP at purchasing power parity per capita is better measuring stick than just raw GDP. For Ethiopia it's roughly $2,100.

For the curious, do you have any references for your number? I'd like to read more about GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, as well as see some stats that are relevant to Ethiopians.

EDIT: I found a decent starting spot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

This article completely backs up my feeling that using raw GDP is super misleading. Even PPP adjusted GDP, "can be problematic because GDP per capita is not a measure of personal income." I feel like this confirms my suspicion that the article is mis-using economic stats to make a misleading argument.

Try to think issues that skew the PPP's relevance to teachers relative pay and you realize that the skew must be against direction you are arguing.

Setting up and operating such a network requires some serious know-how - know-how that pretty much nobody in your scenario is going to have. And never mind the practical problems of running computers in a rural setting (see my post above).

This could be useful for general teaching, while the role of face-to-face teachers may change for more one-on-one teaching. Something that many parents long for their children in an age where schools are being shut down and combined into "megaschools" (UK)

That said, is unbelievable what kids are getting on their own from access to what is available on the internet. It is truly transforming rural areas.