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integration of each classroom with the rest of the school, and the school with the surrounding community

children can best create meaning and make sense of their world through environments which support "complex, varied, sustained, and changing relationships between people, the world of experience, ideas and the many ways of expressing ideas."

In each classroom there are studio spaces in the form of a large, centrally located atelier and a smaller mini-atelier, and clearly designated spaces for large- and small-group activities.

Reggio teachers place a high value on their ability to improvise and respond to children's predisposition to enjoy the unexpected.

Regardless of their origins, successful projects are those that generate a sufficient amount of interest and uncertainty to provoke children's creative thinking and problem-solving and are open to different avenues of exploration

teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a contributor to learning; thus a major teaching strategy is purposely to allow mistakes to happen, or to begin a project with no clear sense of where it might end.

OLPC laptops, which are rugged and energy efficient and run an open-source variant of the Linux operating system, are in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia and Haiti, and even in the United States and Australia. Uruguay, a compact South American nation of 3.5 million people, is the only country that has fully embraced the concept and given every elementary school child and teacher an XO laptop

no increased math or language skills, no improvement in classroom instruction quality, no boost in time spent on homework, no improvement in reading habits

On the positive side, the "dramatic increase in access to computers" accelerated by about six months students' abstract reasoning, verbal fluency and speed in processing information

"We knew from the start that it wouldn't be possible to improve the teachers," he said, citing a 2007 census of 180,000 Peruvian teachers that showed more than 90 percent lacked basic math skills while three in five could not read above sixth-grade level.

Each teacher was supposed to get 40 hours of OLPC training. That hardly helped in schools where teachers had never so much as booted up a computer. In Patzer's experience "most of them barely knew how to interact with the computers at all."

In the higher grades, Martinez said, children's use of the machines is mostly social

"For them, the laptop is more for playing than for learning,"

Negroponte thinks the main goal of technology educators should be simply getting computers into poor kids' hands.His proposal last year to parachute tablet computers from helicopters, limiting the involvement of adults and "educators," caused some colleagues to wince. But Negroponte is dead serious, and has begun a pilot project in two Ethiopian villages to test whether tablets alone, loaded with the right software, can teach children to read.

The OLPC team always considered Internet connectivity part of the recipe for success. They also insisted that each child be given a laptop and be permitted to take it home.Uruguay, a small, flat country with a far higher standard of living and ubiquitous Internet, has honored those requirementsPeru did not

Some schools didn't have enough electricity to power the machines.And then there was the Internet. Less than 1 percent of the schools studied had it.

1.Why not have a dedicated half hour at the end of every school day in every primary school devoted to the simple enjoyment of reading and writing.2. Regular visits from storytellers, theatre groups, poets, writers of fiction and non-fiction, and librarians from the local library.3. Inviting fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers into school to tell and read stories, to listen to children reading, one to one. The work of organisations such at Volunteer Reading Help and Reading Matters are already doing great thing to help young people and schools.4. Ensuring that the enjoyment of literature takes precedence, particularly in the early years, over the learning of the rules of literacy, important though they are.  Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a school exercise.5.  Parents, fathers in particular, and teachers, might be encouraged to attend book groups themselves, in or out of the school, without children, so that they can develop a love of reading for themselves, which they can then pass on to the children.6. Teacher training should always include modules dedicated to developing the teachers' own appreciation of literature, so that when they come to read to the children or to recommend a book, it is meant, and the children know it. To use books simply as a teacher's tool is unlikely to convince many children that books are for them, particularly those that are failing already, many of whom will be boys.7.  The library in any school should have a dedicated librarian or teacher/librarian, be well resourced, and welcoming, the heart of every school.  Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and most necessary steps in education and librarians, teachers and parents all over the country know it. It is our children's right and it is also our best hope and their best hope for the future.