How technology can make up for bad, absent teachers in poor-country schools

“B

ooks will soon be obsolete in schools,” Thomas Edison announced in 1913: they would, he believed, soon be replaced by silent films. Each new wave of information technology—radio, television, computers—has led to similar predictions. And each time, the old technologies of books, classrooms and teachers have proved startlingly resilient.

Like teachers, digital educational technology comes in many forms, from wonderful to appalling. But, used properly, it now deserves more prominence in schools—especially in poor countries where human teachers are often ignorant, absent or both.

The un’s Millennium Development Goals included the ambition that by 2015 all the world’s children would complete primary school. This has largely been achieved: nine out of ten children are now enrolled. Alas, the figure is not as impressive as it sounds. Even though most of the world’s children go to school, an awful lot of them learn pretty much nothing there. According to a recent World Bank study of seven sub-Saharan African countries, half of nine-year-olds cannot read a simple word and three-quarters cannot read a simple sentence. The reason is terrible teaching. The same study found that only 7% of teachers had the minimum knowledge needed to teach reading and writing effectively. When classrooms were inspected to see whether a teacher was present, half the time the answer was no.

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