Two MIT researchers, Nicholas Negroponte and Matt Keller, have been conducting an experiment with children in Ethiopia that is so breathtaking that news about it has reverberated around the world. (We thank Gillian Tett from the Financial Times for bringing news about this experiment to her readers in the FT).

In her words: “Six months ago, they dropped dozens of boxed iPads into two extremely remote villages in Ethiopia, where the population was completely illiterate, dirt poor and had no prior exposure to electronics. They did not leave any instructions, aside from telling the village elders that the iPads were designed for kids aged four to 11. They also showed one adult how to charge the iPads with a solar-powered device. Then the researchers vanished and monitored what happened next by making occasional visits and tracking the behaviour of the children via Sim cards, USB sticks and cameras installed in the iPads.

“The results, which will be unveiled in Boston later this month, are thought-provoking, particularly for anyone involved in the education business. Within minutes of the iPads landing among the mud huts, the kids had unpacked the boxes and worked out how to turn them on.

“Then, in both villages, activity coalesced around a couple of child leaders, who made the mental leap to explore those tablets – and taught the others what to do. In one village, this leader turned out to be a partly-disabled child: Although he had never been a dominant personality before, he was a natural explorer, so became the teacher.

“The discovery process then became intense. When the children used the iPads, they did not behave like Western adults might, namely sitting with a machine each on their laps in isolation. Instead they huddled together, touching and watching each other’s machines, constantly swapping knowledge. Within days, they were using the pre-installed apps, with games, movies and educational lessons. After a couple of months, some were singing the American “alphabet song” and recognising letters (at the request of the Ethiopian government, the machines were all in English).

“More startling still, one gang of kids even worked out how to disable a block that the Boston-based researchers had installed into the machines, which was supposed to stop them taking pictures of themselves. And all of this apparently happened without any adult supervision – and anyone in those mud huts having handled text before.”

In a way, this reinforces impressions we all get whenever we purchase any advanced technology apparatus, whether a new mobile, a new laptop, etc and then watch helplessly as our children quickly become its masters while we are left to flounder trying to understand the gobblygedook written on the ‘guides’.

Of course, the implications of this experiment, if validated, go much further. All our educational effort is based on the theory that to understand modern technology one needs to have mastered literacy and to have emerged from that institution on which we all devote much time and money that is our educational process.

The researchers themselves have already drawn three tentative conclusions. The first is that, “no matter how remote children are, or how illiterate their community, they have the ability to figure out sophisticated technology,” as Keller says.

Second, and leading from that first point, technology can potentially be a potent self-learning tool.

And third, Keller concludes that “getting kids access to technology may be much more important than giving them schools”. Instead of pouring money into shiny buildings and teacher training, in other words, aid groups might do better just to distribute mobile phones and laptops with those self-teaching games.

In our country, we have tried to bridge the divide: We have given our children much technological help in the form of laptops for the teachers, white boards, etc, and we have also built shiny new schools.

This may not be everything, but we are indeed seeing more and more students entering university or going for tertiary education. But somewhere along the line we might ask ourselves if we are giving our children new tools but then locking them up in outmoded cultural frameworks that stunt children’s natural instinct for inquiry and experiment. New technology requires a new overall approach.