There are indications that the Federal Government may have opted out of the One Laptop Per Child programme targeted at giving each Nigerian schoolchild one laptop at the expense of government.
The Minister of Education, Dr. Igwe Aja-Nwachukwu, gave this indication at the 54th session of the National Council on Education, which ended in Katsina on Friday.
OLPC, which runs as a non-governmental organisation, was founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus, Nicholas Negroponte, with a declared mission of making laptops available to children all over the world especially in developing countries.
Negroponte had proposed that big countries, including Nigeria and India, should be involved in the first phase of the project by making a commitment to buy one million systems for free distribution to schoolchildren.
However, the minister in his address said, �It is a truism that ICT or computer appreciation and application in modern globalised capitalist market economy is indispensable, if the products of our education system are to be competitive and hold their own in international labour market.
�Thus, we shall continue to emphasise the deployment of ICT in both teaching and learning in all levels of our education sector. The degree of application of computer in our schools will vary from one level to another.
�However, we shall not allow our primary and secondary schools to become a dumping ground for all forms of computer �toys� in the name of one computer per Nigerian child, bearing in mind that there are more fundamental needs of our basic and secondary education sub-sectors.�
Dec242007