It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" -- they will not say children at first. And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you.
這很美妙,當你遇到一個國家元首時,你說, “你國家最珍貴的資源是甚麼?” 他們不會第一時間說是兒童。 但是當你說兒童的時候, 他們幾乎馬上會認同你。
(Video): We're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years.
(視頻)我們今天將和哥倫比亞的國防部長 一起出遊, 即是軍隊的負責人也是警力部門的負責人, 並且我們要發放650台筆記本 就在今天,給兒童們 那些沒有電視,沒有電話的兒童們, 他們生存在一個 與外界隔離的環境裡, 這樣已經有40年之久了。
The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don't have electricity at home or at school. And in some countries -- let me pick Afghanistan -- 75 percent of the little girls don't go to school. And I don't mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade -- they don't go.
對於在這個地區發放電腦的重要性是 將那些由於哥倫比亞革命武裝力量而被分離的兒童 聯繫起來, 游擊隊在40年前開始 由一種政治運動轉變為一種毒品運動。 全世界裡十億人口的兒童, 他們中的一半都沒有電力 無論是在學校還是在家。 在某些國家 — 舉個例子,阿富汗 — 75%的小女孩不會去上學。 我指的不是她們被學校退學 在三年級或四年級的時候 — 她們根本沒有去上學。
So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it's gone from an idea to a real laptop. We have half a million laptops today in the hands of children. We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. So, in rough numbers, there are a million laptops. That's smaller than I predicted -- I predicted three to 10 million -- but is still a very large number.
所以這3年以來 自從我在TED裡演講和展示了一個產品原型, 它從一個想法 轉變成了一個真正的筆記本。 我們現在有50萬台筆記本 都發放到小孩手裡了。 我們還有大概25萬台正在運送 給那些其他的兒童, 而且還有另外25萬台 已經正被訂購中。 那麼,大概算來,這裡有100萬台筆記本。 那比我預測的要少 — 我預測的是300萬到1千萬台 — 不過這是一個十分大的數字。
In Colombia, we have about 3,000 laptops. It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working, not the Minister of Education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years' worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations lived.
在哥倫比亞,我們有大概3000台筆記本。 和我們所合作的是國防部長, 而不是教育部長,因為這被看作是 一個戰術防禦問題 為着解放這些區域 那些完全被隔離的區域, 而這些的人正是那些造成 40年之久的轟炸,綁架 以及刺殺,並生還的人。
And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. They've leapfrogged. The change is absolutely monumental, because it's not just opening it up, but it's opening it up to the rest of the world. So yes, they're building roads, yes, they're putting in telephone, yes, there will be television. But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages, so the children grow up with access to information, with a window into the rest of the world. Before, they were closed off.
然後突然, 那些小孩用筆記本聯繫起來了。 他們超越了上一代。 這個變化是絕對有紀念意義的, 因為這不僅僅是開放了, 而是對世界其他所有的地方開放了。 所以,對了,他們將會建造公路,對,他們將會有電話, 對,那裡將會有電視。 但是6到12歲的小孩 卻是用西班牙語和當地語言在上網, 所以兒童伴隨著 通向知識的道路而長大, 通過一個通向其他世界的窗口。 以前,他們是被封閉的。
Interestingly enough, in other countries, it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic growth. And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years. It's not going to happen, you know, in one year, but it's an important, deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children. Thirty-one countries in total are involved, and in the case of Uruguay, half the children already have them, and by the middle of 2009, every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop -- a little green laptop.
有趣的是,在其他一些的國家, 財政部長會把這看作是 財政增長的動力。 而且那是一個在20年後才會看到結果的動力。 你知道,那是不會在1年裡看到結果的, 但是這是一個重要的,具有重大經濟意義的 文化改變 一個通過兒童發生的變化。 總共31個國家會參與進來, 就烏拉圭而言, 一半的兒童已經擁有了它們, 而且在2009年中期, 烏拉圭的每一個兒童都會擁有一台筆記本 — 一台小巧的綠色筆記本。
Now what are some of the results? Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying they have never loved teaching so much, and reading comprehension measured by third parties -- not by us -- skyrockets. Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents. They own the laptops. They take them home. And so when I met with three children from the schools, who had traveled all day to come to Bogota, one of the three children brought her mother. And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had been teaching her mother how to read and write. Her mother had not gone to primary school. And this is such an inversion, and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change.
現在其中的一些結果是? 其中的一些結果 每一個國家都能觀察到 包括老師都說到 他們從來沒有如此這樣熱愛教學過, 沒有這樣熱愛閱讀理解 由第三方統計到的結果 — 不是我們自己 — 明顯飆升。 我們看到最重要的事情可能是 兒童在教育他們的家長。 他們有筆記本。他們把筆記本帶回家。 所以當我在學校裡遇到3個小孩, 都是從波哥大經過一天路程而來, 其中一個小孩帶來了她的母親。 她帶母親來的一個原因是 這個6歲的小孩 已經在教她的母親 如何讀和寫。 她的母親沒有上過小學。 這是如此一個倒置, 一個如此美妙的例子 小孩做為變化的推動者。
So now, in closing, people say, now why laptops? Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No. The reason you want laptops is that the word is education, not laptop. This is an education project, not a laptop project. They need to learn learning. And then, just think -- they can have, let's say, 100 books. In a village, you have 100 laptops, each with a different set of 100 books, and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books. You and I didn't have 10,000 books when we went to primary school.
所以現在,做為結尾,人們說到, 現在為甚麼用筆記本? 筆記本就是一個奢侈品,這就像給他們 iPod 一樣。不行。 你們想要筆記本的原因是 教育這個詞,而不是筆記本。 這是一個教育項目,不是一個筆記本項目。 他們需要學會學習。然後,就像想一下 — 他們可以擁有,比如說,100本書。 在一個村莊裡,你有100本筆記本, 每一個都被安放了100本不一樣的書籍, 這樣這個村莊就一下子有了10000書。 在當你上小學的時候你可沒有10000書。
Sometimes school is under a tree, or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education, so you need a collaborative model of learning, not just building more schools and training more teachers, which you have to do anyway. So we're once again doing "Give One, Get One." Last year, we ran a "Give One, Get One" program, and it generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free. And by being a zero-dollar laptop, we can go to countries that can't afford it at all. And that's what we did. We went to Haiti, we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mongolia. Places that are not markets, seeding it with the principles of saturation, connectivity, low ages, etc. And then we can actually roll out large numbers.
有時候學校就在一顆樹底下, 或在許多情況下,老師只上了5年的學, 所以你需要一個互相合作的學習模型, 而不是去造更多的學校和訓練更多的老師。 這些也是你無論無何都要做的, 所以,我們又再一次發起了「送一台,買一台」運動。 去年,我們發起了「送一台,買一台」計劃, 並且創造了100,000台筆記本 這些我們都可以用來免費送出去。 而且作為一個0美元筆記本, 我們可以送到一些完全負擔不起的國家去。 那也是我們已做到的。我們去了海地, 我們去了盧旺達,阿富汗。 埃塞俄比亞,蒙古。 一些沒有市場的地方, 用著飽和度, 連接性的,低年齡的,等等的原則去看待它。 而且我們可以產生一些比較大的數字。
So think of it this way: think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. And think of the laptop as a vaccine. You don't vaccinate a few children. You vaccinate all the children in an area.
所以這樣去看待它: 就像和接種兒童一樣 對無知、愚味的接種, 把筆記本當作是一種疫苗。 你不僅僅為少許的兒童去接種防疫。 你是為一個地區的所有兒童發放疫苗。