When I was in elementary school around the age of 13, Macedonia’s government implemented a new law to push up its falling ratings in Education (+Technology).

Computer science was a subject we all had to go through (after the mandatory ‘Technical Education’ where we built stuff including small houses, cars, electrical boards and the likes) where we had to learn more about working with Microsoft Office products, using MS Paint (trivial, as was the class), and if we drew a tree perfectly, or managed to draw lines with different thickness, we had the rest of the class to play small online flash games. We loved getting to work with the computers, in a non-casual way, because at the time, rarely anyone had a computer on their desk, or would rarely see one. After two years of this type of class-slacking, the government decides it’s time for a forward leap into the world of IT and education, so implements the policy of “One Computer per Child” in any classroom. 

Now, even at that age, my skepticism was growing high by the day – they managed to choose the cheapest option of bringing (luckily) functional computers in every classroom in every school country-wide, and was praised by several news publishing media how after being the underdog for quite some time after Yugoslavia, Macedonia was lowering its odds in something significant.

Did it back-fire? Not really, the literacy rates didn’t drop down, the grades were kept constant or went up depending on the school’s acceptance criteria, but did the computers do that? Well…

The main thing that did happen with those computers is damage. Lots of it. People were stealing the mice (although they didn’t really need it, it was just a pure act of elementary school vandalism and rebellion against who knows what), cracking the computer screens by accidentally passing by it and dropping it on the floor, getting keyboard keys switched, throwing them at each other and other typical Macedonian-schools stuff.

We rarely turned on our computers. When we did, it was time for online flash pool, or tetris, as they were the only flash games that somehow did go past the proxy of the school. They used Ubuntu as their Operating System which was frankly a great idea for educational purposes, installed a couple of Physics Lab, Math Lab and the such, applications, and most importantly – they taught the students how to bypass the system and use complex codes in the given command prompt on Ubuntu which, if I recall correctly was called ‘The Terminal’, just to mess with the screens of other kids’ computers and leave inappropriate messages for the teacher to see through a different link (the Master PC had a surveillance program, so the teacher could see what we were doing at any time, but of course, we quickly learnt how to avoid that and continue our merry way in an anonymous fashion).

Teachers refused to work with computers. Mostly because we had elderly teachers that knew their subjects, but refused to mix it up with learning about how to use what was given to them to utilize time.

A typical high school classroom in Macedonia. See all the books in front of the computers? Yeah…

So the government spent millions per annuum to just keep up the image of a developed country – ‘look at us, we have computers for EVERYONE!… they are not using it in any practical sense, but we have them anyways.’

We still have the computers, broken ones get replaced every time, if they are reported, but who would know since no one has pressed the power button in years, we didn’t write papers on them, we didn’t take notes, no presentations, no applications used, but we did have a collection of random funny photos on them, and some downloadable flash game, so hurray for us, we had procrastination installed in the classroom, in front of us, at all times, for the sake of education (and the country’s image). What?

So that did backfire in a small sense for our government, but somehow education went up (and it was neither a causal or co-relational effect of the computers – it was the baby boom – more applicants to college, more competitiveness and the Medical School at the University of Ss. Cyrillus and Methodius  can now boast an acceptance rate as low as Harvard’s (don’t take my full word on this one) with applicants’ scores from the national baccalaureate ranging from 97 as the last accepted person in medical school in the private quota, and 100 as the first in the national quota (100 is the maximum score, and it works on a curve, meaning they didn’t just score all the points at the final exams, but did better than a 100% !!! of the country’s graduating class, whereas the poor soul who got in last did better than 97% of the whole graduating class. Shame on his family, shame on his cow).

Anyway, the country can still say they were the first in the world (apparently) to do the policy of One Computer:One Child, it didn’t have any effects whatsoever, it’s still going on, and recently Uruguay decided to join, and my friend from Uruguay and anyone discussing this in my IB Econ class was thrilled and said it helped Uruguay’s economy. No it didn’t. It’s a waste of money, and I’m sorry they didn’t use Macedonia as a case study to avoid the unnecessary burning away of the money they could’ve spent on wellfare.

Then again, I wish that at least for them – it brings some positive results back.