Electronic books to teach Afghans basics of public health, a wire story in USA Today story, tells how Washington will send 20,000 Leapfrog audio e-book machines to teach women in Afghanistan the basics of public health. This sounds like an imaginative and appropriate use of technology.
At the same time the Bush administration and Kerry-Edwards should be looking ahead. What about the possibility of working toward a well-stocked national digital library system for Afghanistan? No, it wouldn’t happens at once. But given the expected decreases in the prices of affordable hardware, experiments would be helpful now. They might include print on demand books and other appropriate technology and help pave the way for a network of schools without the fundamentalist ideology that so tragically turns children into terrorists. Perhaps an embryonic library system could tie in with the interesting work of Greg Mortenson‘s Central Asia Institute, which helps people in developing countries improve their educational standards and fight terror with books. Already steps have been taken to archive Afghani culture, but archives are not to be confused with a full-scale national digital library system in the TeleRead vein.
This is the stuff that U.S. politicians should be talking about, as opposed to just homeland security and national defense. Part of the problem is that the Third World perceives us as hypermaterialistic without a balancing interest in humanity. Is it any wonder that the terrorists are so focused on the destruction of financial centers, which they regard as an attack on the very essence of the American soul? More emphasis on innovative foreign aid programs–not just out of security concerns but for heartfelt humanitarian reasons–would send a powerful signal to the other inhabitants of Planet Earth.
