INTEL CORPORATION
MR. CRAIG BARRETT, CHAIRMAN
OF THE BOARD
(Tunis, Tunisia, 16 November 2005)
Mr.
President, Mr. Secretary General, Your Excellencies, Ladies
and Gentlemen.
I would like to join the previous
speakers in thanking the Tunisian government for this
visionary initiative to dedicate a summit on Information
Society
There have been unprecedented changes in
the world’s economic structure in the past decade. With
Russia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North Africa, Latin
America, India, China & Southeast Asia joining world’s free
economic system competition has changed forever. Geographic
areas, countries, states, cities, people are now competing
at all levels. And increasingly the competition is based on
valued added skills associated with educational
accomplishment.
There has been equally unprecedented
change in the impact of technology on economic
competitiveness. The PC & the internet have emerged as
powerful forces impacting every aspect of our daily lives.
Very simply, the internet has become the medium of choice
for information access, communication, decision making,
commerce, education, & much more.
Perhaps the most profound impact is on
information access, education, & the ability to make
knowledge based decisions. In the past, education &
knowledge-based decision making were primarily the domain of
the developed economies. And as the standard of living
generally closely tracks educational level, the highest
standard of living went to the developed economies. In a
sense, geographic location at birth was destiny.
But, as the PC & the internet have
leveled the playing field the competitive rules have
changed. One has only to look at young children in the poor
districts of Sao Paulo, Cairo, or Bangalore when given
access to & instruction in PC/Internet to realize that every
child on the face of the earth now has the potential to
succeed.
National government are increasingly
recognizing this trend & providing access to PCs & the
internet in the elementary education years. The parallel
effort to train teachers how to use technology in the
classroom to increase educational effectiveness is also
underway.
None of these actions is solely in the
domain of the developed economies. Poor economies can
address this issue as they focus on access to technology
rather than ownership of technology. Schools, community
centers, kiosks, internet cafes, can all offer PC & internet
access even to the lowest economic levels.
Today we are just starting to see the
impact of these global changes around the world. Today,
medical diagnostics, hardware design, patent attorneys,
financial accounting, software coding & much more can be
done remotely. The internet - with its resultant low cost
communication & data processing capability - has indeed
flattened the world. Geographic location is no longer
destiny. Rather, education coupled with computer &
communication skills is destiny.
Because of this the world of the future,
I believe, holds great promise for nearly all its citizens.
Every child with access to computing & communications
infrastructure has the potential for success. The challenge
facing governments around the world is relatively
straightforward. Provide your young citizens the opportunity
to succeed. Provide them with quality teachers & access to
technology.
Please don’t be misled by the myth that
increased access to technology gives increased results. If
that were true, the young citizens of my country, the United
States, would have the highest aptitude for mathematics and
science in the world because they have the highest density
of PCs in their classrooms of any young children around the
world. In fact, the reality could not be farther from this
prediction. In international test after test the young
children from my country rank at the lowest levels in
mathematics and science aptitude.
What does succeed is access to the
technology AND quality teaching. This is something that
every government should strive to provide to their young
citizens. As we like to say at Intel, computers are not
magic, teachers are magic. Around the world, we should all
be focusing as much attention on quality teaching as we do
on technology access.
I hope these observations can provide the
basis for further discussion as this summit proceeds.
Thank you
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