In Peru, a Pint-Size Ticket to Learning

Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.

Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.

Kevin, 11, wants to play trumpet.

Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town's recent Fiesta de la Virgen.

"What they work with most is the [built-in] camera. They love to record," said Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot project to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.

Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this hamlet of 800 people arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins.

Arahuay's lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.

Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the workweek in fields many hours' walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.

When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.

Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima's shantytowns four hours away.

It's the best answer yet to "a global crisis of education" in which curriculums have no relevance, he said. "If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes."

Indeed, Arahuay's elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school's director.