email cures poverty

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Jan 14 14:58:03 PST 2000


More proof that computers can work miracles. Bill Clinton said this yesterday to a group of bigwigs collected by Jesse Jackson and his Wall Street Project at the Sheraton Towers Hotel in NYC:


>I went to Hudson County, New Jersey, which has a lot of
>first-generation immigrants, in a school that had so many problems it
>was almost closed by the state. And then the principal of this high
>school not only started making sure all the immigrant kids whose first
>language was not English were trained on the computer, they started
>putting computers in the parents' home and showing them how to do it --
>so that all these low-income working people could e-mail their parents,
>teachers, and their principals every day. The dropout rate went way
>down and the performance of these kids in a low-income neighborhood,
>most of them immigrant kids, rose above the state average of New Jersey.
>
>We can do this if we close the digital divide. (Applause.)



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