A Critical View of the “One Laptop per Child ” Project

This Paper presents a critical view of the “One Laptop per Child ” project, whose objective is to provide each public school student with a portable, cheap computer. After briefly describing the project, arguments against its implementation are given considering local problems in Brazil, which may be applied to many developing countries, as well as universal problems. The latter includes the author’s concepts, published for the first time in 1976, that computers and the Internet are damaging to a healthy mental development of children and adolescents and also citing objective results of various pieces of research showing that students ’ achievements are in general damaged by the use of those technologies