The colonialism of “The Charisma Machine” book by Morgan Ames disrespects Latin American education and research

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Collective of Latin American Scholars (54 signed below, from Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Costa Rica, published June 27th 2021)

A disturbing pattern in US academia has been to use developing countries as data troves while omitting the scholarship from those same countries. Unfortunately Morgan Ames’s recent book, “The Charisma Machine,” follows this pattern.

While we respect the book’s goal to document a pilot implementation of an educational laptop/technology program in Paraguay, its attempt to generalize the findings can only be accomplished by silencing local voices that clearly counter its “sensational” findings. “The Charisma Machine,” presents research findings that ultimately characterize Latin American constructionist educators and scholars as unintellectual and easy to manipulate, and interprets data with a consistent US-centric bias. That is a type of intellectual colonialism that should be avoided.

In this manifesto, we--a gender and ethnically diverse group of scholars, teachers, and educators from Latin America--express our disappointment at the book’s research approach, directly challenge its findings, and question its methods and use of data. In summary, we point out that:

  1. “The Charisma Machine” examines one country at a specific stage of its deployment as its primary data source, ignoring other countries in Latin America with vastly different outcomes that directly counter the book’s main findings. The book’s generalizations point to the generation extreme, “attention-grabbing,” shocking findings, rather than nuanced, balanced research.

  2. In criticizing Nicholas Negroponte’s dealings in Latin America, “The Charisma Machine” implicates the regional community of constructionist researchers in these dealings and in Silicon Valley-style edtech. In fact, this community--which includes prominently female researchers and many scholars of color--has been actively fighting privatization of public schools and technological imperialism for decades.

  3. “The Charisma Machine” is based on fieldwork in Latin America but barely cites research from local scholars. The book chooses to portray Latin American scholars and teachers as defenseless, implying that the continent bowed down to Nicholas Negroponte’s charisma without an intelligent reaction. That was absolutely not the case.

  4. Pre-pandemic, the author engaged on a book tour all over the US, Germany, Denmark, and Italy. Out of more than ten book talks, zero were done in Latin America. The endorsements to the book do not have a single scholar from Latin America. Her interviews with the press do not include a single Latin American publication. The book reviews and commentary on her website do not have a single person from Latin America.

  5. Research for the book concluded in 2013. Yet it came out in 2020. As far as we know, no follow-up data collection or updating happened in seven years, during which extensive local research took place and implementations were refined.


Latin America has been a fertile ground for educational innovation. It is the continent of Paulo Freire, Lea Fagundes, and so many others. Hundreds of researchers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers have implemented new technologies in education, including laptop programs. In the 80s, Costa Rica surprised the world by announcing that kids in rural and underserved communities would learn to code (see Omar Dengo Foundation.) For 40 years, multiple organizations (Quirós Tanzi, Universidad Castro Carazo, PROTEA) have been offering enriched learning experiences for children and youth despite all the difficulties and economic obstacles, including special attention to rural young girls and their mothers, rural elementary schools, and teacher capacity building. These efforts were initiated and are led by a large community of female Constructionist researchers.

In 2006, Uruguay launched Plan Ceibal, a national long-term policy that has transformed education in the country. It started with a program aimed at social inclusion through the creation of a universal technological platform and the reduction of the digital divide including distribution of laptops for students, inspired by OLPC, but with deep local reinterpretation and changes built over years of research and refinements. In 2006, only 25% of Uruguayan homes had access to computers and internet. Plan Ceibal reduced this gap by 2013 when 67% of Uruguayan homes had a computer, and 96% of the schools were connected to the internet (Vaillant, 2013). Plan Ceibal’s success did not stop at giving access to devices and the internet. That was just the beginning. It expanded into a range of educational projects that made the country a world-class example in terms of student impact, the use of open licenses, teacher capacity building, and emancipation from foreign interventionism. Now a 15-year old institution, Plan Ceibal even changed federal laws in Uruguay to make its funding stable.

In 2007-2008 Peru approved a national initiative to implement laptops in rural one-teacher multigrade schools. The initiative required an ambitious deployment strategy, including solar power panels and a countrywide teacher training program 100% written by Peruvian scholars. Peru deviated from OLPC’s designs due to the lack of Internet access. As an example of the resourcefulness of local Peruvian scholars, they circumvented this difficulty by developing a low-cost solution for asynchronous internet access based on periodically updated memory sticks. There were other important Constructionist implementations, such as work in public schools starting in the ’80s, which resulted in the development of a Quechua version of educational robotics software and one of the world’s largest educational robotics programs.

Uruguay, Peru, and Costa Rica are just three cases that directly contradict the findings of “The Charisma Machine.” But the author admittedly spent only “four full days of observations” (p. 102) in Uruguay. In a country that offered a different version of the book’s findings, the author claims that “in Uruguay [...] I found it difficult to get beyond the party line with officials” (p. 216). When commenting about a conference in Uruguay in which the keynote was no one less than the iconic president José Mujica, she offensively calls the event “a self-congratulatory conference hosted by Plan Ceibal” (p. 246), demeaning the achievements of Latin American educators. It is hard to know what to make of the statement that one of the most left-leaning, participatory, progressive governments in the history of Latin America (José Mujica’s) was not welcoming researchers and “did not let her go beyond the party line”? The achievements of Plan Ceibal are dismissed, erased, and demeaned, and this is not acceptable. Since the visit to Uruguay, the author had ten years to update the research results but chose not to.

There are also many other important cases of constructionist interventions in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and many other countries, with a strong component of equity and inclusivity. These cases go from developing programming languages for children in local languages and low-cost projects for robotics (I, II, III) to entirely new networks of grassroots constructionist educators with participation in the thousands. And those results and cases are not hard to find: there are also annual conferences attended by hundreds of scholars, journals, books, and book collections.

But none of those cases or research are shown as counterpoints to the book’s flashy findings, and they challenge the book's central claim: that “charismatic constructionist technologies” have consistently fooled the developing world. You can only arrive at that conclusion if you ignore local research, eliminate nuances, and cherry-pick data. Or if you ignore that problematic implementations are common with or without laptops, with or without constructionism. Where are educational reforms unproblematic? Indeed, a recent review of “The Charisma Machine” in the Comparative Education Review journal (Ruétalo, 2020) states that “the author excluded the immense amount of planning and energy required for national education reform. [...] In addition, the case of Paraguay was a very small sample, relative to other national programs and generalizing from a particular case can be dangerous” (p. 547). The review also recognizes that “While the OLPC cases written about in the text largely failed, it should be noted that other examples exist, demonstrating how early-stage OLPC programs can move beyond the initial problems of the model” (p. 548).

From the book’s US-Centric perspective, programs in Latin American were a "failure" because of the author’s experience in one pilot project in a single country that has had many historical challenges. In Paraguay, the book claims that test scores did not go up. Broken laptops were found in schools. Electricity was spotty. Some programs did not last beyond specific government terms. [still, see footnote 1 with links to three international reports (I, II, III) with positive results.] The book tries to assign to constructionism blame that belongs to the larger failures of most educational reforms in any country, and tries to implicate the entire constructionist community of researchers and teachers in wrong approaches to implement EdTech reforms. With an inexplicable arrogance, and perhaps to make its message more shocking and trendy, the book intentionally muddles the waters to make Negroponte, Seymour Papert, privatizers of education, MOOC advocates, Silicon Valley, and Latin American constructionists one and the same. We firmly disagree with this approach.

“The Charisma Machine’s” narrative ignores some very common knowledge in Latin America:

  1. Many Constructionist-inspired Latin American programs brought many other benefits, such as funding public universities to do research on education, creating local capacity and programs for professional development of teachers, and changing principles of public policy.

  2. Given the lack of funding for public schools in Latin America and the complexity of building infrastructure, many of these programs took several years or decades to take hold, not just a year or two. The book comes out of a Ph.D. dissertation, which had a data collection period of just a few months. Field research for the book concluded in 2013 and the results were never updated.

  3. Many constructionist projects in Latin America are alternatives to competing pre-packaged projects being sold to governments by US-based big tech companies. In Latin America, “Silicon Valley” edtech and constructionism are radically different approaches to educational technology.

But “The Charisma Machine’s” US-Centrism goes further. Local research from Latin American authors barely appears in the citations (despite the book’s many citations to World Bank reports.) We are portrayed as a powerless, unintellectual, and naïve bunch. The truth is quite different: many of the technology projects that came to Latin America, including one-laptop-per-child programs implemented in the continent, had active intellectual reinterpretation from local scholars and educators. We did not blindly take Negroponte’s shiny tech, as the book tries to imply. Scholars in Latin American universities examined the work, proposed extensive changes or entirely new formulations. Some implementations worked, some did not (just like in the US or Europe), some took many cycles of refinements. We learned from our failures as well, just like North American scholars are allowed to. It is colonialist to “allow” US scholars to have years and years to try, refine, and improve their implementation, while the book considers that Latin America has to get it right on the first attempt. We would love to know which technology implementations in North America were implemented without problems, failures, and multiple redesigns.

Constructionist teachers and scholars have been fighting big corporations, dictatorships, extreme-right governments, and Silicon Valley-inspired educational technologies for decades, trying to offer an alternative to students. But the book unfairly puts them in the same boat as privatizers and anti-public-school Silicon Valley tycoons. It is quite unsettling that Ames uses her US-centric power as a scholar to misrepresent these scholars and educators. Constructionism, in its advocacy of learner empowerment, progressive pedagogies, and emancipatory technologies, is very popular in the continent and often combined with critical pedagogy and other progressive theories. Per the book’s theory, that is all about Papert’s “charisma,” not an honest intellectual position taken by people in the continent.

Papert’s work has been discussed, transformed, criticized, and reinterpreted by Latin American scholars for 40 years now. There is even a well-known event in which Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire are brought together for hours to talk about education, the role of schools, and technology. Scholars in the continent have been combining critical pedagogy and constructionism to create powerful implementations and frameworks that value social justice, equity, and student agency. There are entire journals and conferences dedicated to these themes, but they do not show up in the book’s references. In no way were scholars in the continent uncritically accepting ideas. The “charisma” conclusion simply does not hold.

Ignoring this local reality, “The Charisma Machine” states repeatedly that constructionism is an educational approach in bed with capitalists, all created to the image of “precocious boys” enamored by programming. If the book is correct, then hundreds of progressive, well-informed Latin American scholars and teachers have been fooled by constructionist “charisma” for decades, whereas it was just about scheming with Silicon Valley types. The book’s main claim simply does not hold if you read the literature. Not only is this disrespectful and a gross oversimplification, but it weakens the voice of Latin American educators who are now trying to fight, in many countries, a new wave of right-wing educational regression, and big-tech-inspired solutions.

There is undoubtedly a criticism to be made concerning many implementations of educational technologies, including constructionist programs. But the US-centric and colonialist research from “The Charisma Machine” is not what we deserve. We are not blind followers. As scholars, researchers, practitioners, and teachers, we have been engaging in productive theory building, publication, and constructive criticism of those interventions for decades. Like the broader worldwide education community, we make and learn from mistakes.

By perpetuating a pattern of exploiting Global South countries to generate flashy, easy, and predictable “it did not work” messages, ‘The Charisma Machine’ is an example of imperialistic research that should be averted, once and for all. Latin American researchers and educators deserve better.


[Footnote 1]: Despite the number of difficulties encountered in Paraguay, children that were part of the OLPC program developed life skills (as mentioned in two external evaluations, Report I, Report II, Report III) and became agents of change in their communities. "The Charisma Machine" ignored this.


Signed (updated July 2 2021):

  1. Maria Elizabeth Bianconcini de Almeida, PUC/Brazil

  2. Paz Peña, Paraguay

  3. Mary Gómez, Paraguay

  4. Cecilia Rodriguez Alcala, Paraguay

  5. Flávia Linhalis, UNICAMP/Brazil

  6. Rosane Aragón, UFRGS/Brazil

  7. Ezequiel Aleman, US/Uruguay

  8. Claudia Berbeo, US/Colombia

  9. Maria Elisabette Brisola B Prado, UNIAN/Brazil

  10. Roseli de Deus Lopes, USP/Brazil

  11. Elisa Tomoe Moriya Schlünzen, UNOESTE/UNESP, Brazil

  12. Clotilde Fonseca, Costa Rica

  13. Roseli Zen Cerny, UFSC/Brazil

  14. José A. Valente, UNICAMP/Brazil

  15. Scheila Wesley Martins, Brazil

  16. Eleonora Saxe, Costa Rica

  17. Oscar Becerra, Peru

  18. Ann Berger Valente, US/Brazil

  19. German Escorcia, Colombia/México

  20. Maria Raquel Miotto Morelatti, UNESP/Brazil

  21. Marcus V. Maltempi, UNESP/Brazil

  22. João Vihete Viegas D Abreu, UNICAMP/Brazil

  23. Sérgio Paulino Abranches, UFPE/Brazil

  24. Luz Amalia Botero Montoya, Colombia

  25. M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas, UNICAMP/Brazil

  26. Klaus Schlünzen Junior, UNESP/Brazil

  27. Mauro Cavalcante Pequeno, UFC/Brazil

  28. Paulo Blikstein, US/Brazil

  29. Antonio Battro, Academia Nacional de Educacion/Argentina

  30. Pedro Andrade, Brazil

  31. Fernando Almeida, PUC/Brazil

  32. José Aires de Castro Filho, UFC/Brazil

  33. Claudia Urrea, US/Colombia

  34. Fabiana Lorenzi, Brazil

  35. Marcos da Fonseca Elia, UFRJ/Brazil

  36. Éliton Meireles de Moura, Brazil

  37. Tobias Alencastro, UFSC/Brazil

  38. Claudia Zea, Colombia

  39. Daniela Monteiro Will, UFSC/Brazil

  40. Edna Araujo de Oliveira, UDESC/Brazil

  41. Andre Raabe, UNIVALI/Brazil

  42. Tatiane Rosario, UNIVALI/Brazil

  43. Fábio Ferrentini Sampaio, U. Lisboa/InovLabs/Brazil/Portugal

  44. Ismar Frango, Universidade Mackenzie/Brazil

  45. Bekisizwe Ndimande, US

  46. Karla Angélica Silva do Nascimento, Brazil

  47. Cesar Pereira Viana, UNIVALI/Brazil

  48. Andre Peres, Brazil

  49. Simão Pedro Marinho, Brazil

  50. Valdir José Corrêa Jr., Brazil

  51. Andres Tellez, US/Colombia

  52. Jeanina Umaña, Costa Rica

  53. Thomas Wilkinson, Colombia, México, Panamá, USA, UK

  54. Moisés Zylbersztajn, Brazil