Notes on education, language, and building for African students.
Attempts at this existed before us. They were not good enough for students raised on instant feeds and two-tap interfaces. Here is what we built instead, what 25,931 students did with it — and the thing that surprised us most, which turned out to be language, and the double tax it quietly charges every Ethiopian student.
Every deck about African technology has the same slide: we skipped landlines, we skipped bank branches, therefore we will skip whatever is being sold. The slide is true. The lesson people take from it is backwards. Leapfrogging is not a law of nature — it is a checklist, and most projects fail it.
For most of history you could teach one person well or many people adequately, not both. Mass schooling chose scale, and it was the right call — it took literacy from a small minority to most of humanity. The bill was personal attention. That bill is finally coming down, and the question changes when you no longer have to choose.