Here in Latvia, we've been having long-running debates about the new main library building called the “Castle of Light”. According to information from the official website, the current estimated construction costs are 114.6 million lats, which is 164.25 million euros or 225 million dollars.
Let's calculate what could be done for public education with this kind of money.
Latvia has a population of 2.3 million, and according to various sources, anywhere from 600 thousand to a million of them use the internet. Most likely – it's more, so I'll take the higher figure, which is totally justified. This means these people have access to computers, of some sort and somewhere. Another 300 thousand people are either too old or too young to really care about libraries and the internet.
Thus, that leaves a million people without computers. The cheapest netbook like the OLPC, Intel Classmate PC, or Asus EEE costs about $200 a piece at those volumes.
This way, we could buy educational computers for EVERYONE who doesn't have one, and still have pocket change left over. But here's a better idea – since not all of these people know how to use a computer, and not all of them even need one, let's buy 1 per family. Let's arbitrarily assume there are only 2 people in a family – just to have a safe margin so there's plenty for everyone.
So, out of the 225 million, we've only spent 100. Another 50 – for one, two, or three years of free internet for these people. $5-$10 per family – a totally realistic price if the government holds a tender for a large purchase, seeing as we already have $10 internet in the cities today. The internet won't be blazing fast, but more than enough for educational purposes. The second option – laptops with WiMAX and universal WiMAX across the country – I'm not sure if 50 million is enough here, but it should at least be plenty for the big cities.
This is already great – there are tons of free educational resources on the net, albeit in Russian or English, just remember the infamous Europeana, which did eventually launch. But we still have 75 million left – half of it we can spend on the new library building – except make it a modest one intended strictly for storing the archive of valuable books and manuscripts. Another 20 million – on teaching people how to use the internet and computers.
And the final 20 – for digitizing Latvian books and an e-library website. There's not much need to digitize Western ones – the ones that can be digitized will be handled by the EU, and the ones under copyright can't be touched anyway. Such publishers will just sell them themselves through a website.
If you ask me, what's described above is a far more rational use of 225 million than the planned construction. Besides, the EU is usually happy to fork over mountains of cash for projects like this – so we'd get tens, if not a hundred million more as a freebie.
P.S. And please, don't leave me comments in the spirit of “the government are scumbags and it's all kickbacks”. The world won't get any better because of them. It might be a revelation to you, but there are extremely few countries in the world where people love and trust their government. I'll write about what that implies in my next post.