Apple Executives Meet with Turkish President to Discuss $4.5 Billion iPad Education Initiative

That would be a delight.

Woot woot, for my nation of origin

Crony capitalism.

A massive waste of funds, and the world's resources. Books are great: renewable, re-usable, don't use rare minerals (which we extract / exploit from African countries), don't become obsolete after a few years, don't get stolen, don't have screens to crack.

Hey, I'm a technology user, comp. sci. graduate, and currently an engineer working for a medical devices startup - but people, this insanity with making everything "digital" is costing us the world - literally and figuratively.

Turkey, nor any other country, needs iPads or much tablets in schools.

Of course Turkey is getting USD 1.14Billion in aid this year from the EU, so I guess they can use some of that money to buy iPads from Apple.

http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/instruments/funding-by-country/turkey/index_en.htm

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The general consensus where I'm from is that school is lame and boring, education is a vital part of our existence and its frustrating to see how terrible our system is, how badly it works and how little our Australian government cares about these issues.
I wish the Turkish people success, and hope that from it, others also see the importance of radically changing what needs to be changed.

So giving kids a new toy is going to make them behave?

Day one with iPad at school: "Cool we have an iPad"
Day forty with iPad at school: "Meh, school still sucks"

What needs to change is kid's perception and thereby parenting, not *giving* them more crap to fill up their lives.

I'd be furious if my country spent $4.5 billion on giving iPads to children. What a waste of money. I refuse to believe that giving kids iPads will somehow result in an improvement to their education.

Physical books, jotters and other learning materials are far cheaper, more reliable, and proper.

What a massive waste of public funds. They did a test in a British school and so many ipads were damaged, they are far too brittle and expensive to be used for education. Whats the point anyway? Its not like they will move on and get jobs in any area that will require use of an iPad!

There are countries where kids are taught to look after their stuff.

And it's quite daft to assume they would buy iPads to teach kids to use iPads. You use iPads to teach them maths, physics, languages, history, chemistry and so on and so on.