Many people though that giving kids entire new ways to access knowledge and cooperate on their projects would make them smarter and more generally educated.
And honestly, if you think that's stupid, I'm not really interested on whatever else you think on the subject. It happened to not work for several reasons, some of them mistakes from the OLPC project, but insisting it's an inevitable result is just uninformed blabber.
Well, the BBC had a whole program around getting schools into computing and it worked out fabulously well, so yes. It indirectly ended up giving us a novel processor that is used in just about everything as well.
Are there any studies about the long-term educational effectiveness of those programs? They could definitely be effective wrt. teaching kids simple coding in BASIC or LOGO, but what about other kinds of outcomes?
And honestly, if you think that's stupid, I'm not really interested on whatever else you think on the subject. It happened to not work for several reasons, some of them mistakes from the OLPC project, but insisting it's an inevitable result is just uninformed blabber.