From the OLPC Mission page.

OLPC Mission

Most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are
inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. One in three
does not complete the fifth grade.

The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global
crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and
isolation—just like their parents—never knowing what the light of
learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, their governments
struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy,
hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support
itself, much less contribute to the commonweal, because it lacks the
tools to do so.

It is time to rethink this equation.

Given the resources that developing countries can reasonably
allocate to education—sometimes less than $20 per year per pupil,
compared to the approximately $7500 per pupil spent annually in the
U.S.—even a doubled or redoubled national commitment to traditional
education, augmented by external and private funding, would not get the
job done. Moreover, experience strongly suggests that an incremental
increase of “more of the same”—building schools, hiring teachers,
buying books and equipment—is a laudable but insufficient response to
the problem of bringing true learning possibilities to the vast numbers
of children in the developing world.

Standing still is a reliable recipe for going backward.

Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We
believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into
the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their
own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's
machine designed for “learning learning.”

XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT
Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated
upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by
Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital.

Extensively field-tested and validated among some of the poorest and
most remote populations on earth, constructionism emphasizes what
Papert calls “learning learning” as the fundamental educational
experience. A computer uniquely fosters learning learning by allowing
children to “think about thinking”, in ways that are otherwise
impossible. Using the XO as both their window on the world, as well as
a highly programmable tool for exploring it, children in emerging
nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own
creative and problem-solving potential.

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product
in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit
organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in
even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity
to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of
ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.

There are many in need right here in Arizona, Donate to their cause.

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