We're all wallowing in the same mud...

Reading is one thing; understanding what you read is another.

Since I have several alerts set up for the OLPC, one caught my attention that talked about criticism of the OLPC on AtinaChile. But the truth is that, as almost always happens to me with Atina Chile, I once again found a copy-paste job, and one put together in a way that gives the impression they didn’t understand the idea of the original article, or that somewhere in the copying and pasting they forgot the heart of it.

The original article from Educ.ar is a criticism of the attitude, a permanent one by the way, of OLPC News. When Piscitelli calls OLPC News a Trojan horse site, he is already giving us a hint of where this is going. The heart of it is in the last paragraphs, and not in the ones picked out by the Atina kids, who end up transcribing the impressions of the OLPC News people, but it’s all so muddled that you get the feeling those were the ideas of the Argentine education community.

I think the Atina kids’ lack of tango culture keeps them from appreciating what Piscitelli is getting at.

“…if anything sets this project apart, it is that it has become a projection screen for the interests, desires and expectations of corporations and new industries, of traditional conceptions and innovative counterproposals, of attempts to prop up the status quo and of bold, haphazard renewal, all of them mixed together Discépolo-style.”

The reference, dear readers, is to Enrique Santos Discépolo, the author of the tangos Yira, Yira and Cambalache, and the latter is where the reference comes from.

Indeed, in this project everyone is mixed in together, with so many expectations, and everybody climbs onto this streetcar pulling in their own direction, so the reference to the author of Cambalache is right on target.

I think it would be good if people listened to more tangos. It would do them good, they would understand more, because it turns out that nowadays great ideas seem to end up watered down by people who don’t understand, and in the end we wind up “revolcaos en un merengue y en un mismo lodo todos manoseaos…” (wallowing in a mess, all of us pawed over in the same mud).