'60 Minutes': Why OLPC? Video

'60 Minutes': Why OLPC? Video Transcript

>> Negroponte's idea was that kids don't need teachers to learn the computer. They can pick it up by experimenting on their own or as in this case with help from a friend.

>> That is what we are doing is that that kid is showing this kid that is key. They get it instantly. It takes a 10-year-old child about three minutes.

>> And you're talking about children who've never worked on a computer?

>> Children who've never, in some cases, seen electricity.

>> The laptops are for sale in minimum lots of 250,000. Each cost $176, though Negroponte expects the price will go down to a hundred within two years. You go into countries where there may not be enough food, where the children may not have good enough education to even teach them to read, why a laptop? It almost sounds like a luxury for these people who need so much more than that.

>> Let me take two countries, Pakistan and Nigeria. Fifty per cent of the children in both of those countries are not in school.

>> At all?

>> At all. They have no schools, they don't even have trees under which a teacher might stand.

>> You're saying give them a laptop even if they don't go to school?

>> Especially if they don't go to school.

>> Oh my...

>> If they don't go to school, this is school in a box. ^M00:01:21