The Register notes that Nicholas Negroponte’s controversial One Laptop Per Child project is cutting half of its staff. The article mentions the project’s Give One Get One scheme where one laptop is donated to a poor country for every one purchased in a rich country. It’s hard, in this glaring credit-crunch light, not to see the project as a glorified corporate-giving scheme where the have-lots get an excuse to buy another interesting toy . . .

but that could just be my cynicism at the ideas that laptops are somehow necessary and sufficient for eduction.