You however seem to make a blanket, value judgement that the developing countries would rather have instruments than technology.
That's not my value judgment, that's the reality of what each developing country has chosen. They chose instruments over computers, because instruments are more important.
What bugs me is how people in developed countries are so easily duped, on two levels. First, that a new medium is more important than good content, e.g., the ubiquitous and plentiful videos shared via the Internet, filmed on cellphones, which have little to no cultural merit especially compared with the amount of resources required to share that information. Second, that the use and availiability of that technology, whatever the medium might be, is somehow a necessity of life, when in fact it will become obsolete in ten years time, it requires labour and physical resources outside of all sense of proportion to the technology's merits, and it consequently displaces the cultural activities (such as instrumental music) that are the very fabric of a society.
I'm not saying that, however I think that food and shelter rate a bit more than instrumental music. Also you seem to make your judgement, I Refer to your earlier post. In a developed country they took away YOUR funding.
I never said they took away my funding, but since you're interested, the education system I work in is what we call a public education system. I know the terminology between over here compared to G.B. is topsy-turvy, so I'll clarify: public education here means tax-funded schooling, available unconditionally to any citizen. So again, they never took away my funding, rather they used the funds in a poorly informed manner, i.e. buying computers at the expense of cuts to more important things.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all the time in education, because of the aforementioned duping of the public, and the pressure on politicians and head government authorities to demonstrate results. Because the results are something that are reasoned to the masses, rather than to experts, the most superficial criteria for measuring success generally win out over criteria requiring greater commitment and understanding. This means things like literacy and mathematics tend to get greater priority than other subjects, not because they're more important, but for no other reason than the success of educational methods can be more easily demonstrated in superficial terms. For instance, math scores from school to school can be compared, and graphs of those results can be published in a newspaper. On the other hand, comparing the worth of, for example, various music programs is much more difficult, since the means to measuring success tend to be anecdotal, subjective, and generally more complicated than what most of the population can understand. That's where the limits of democracy are reached: the capacity for understanding by the masses in any given field will always be inferior to the capacity for understanding by the experts in each of the experts' respective fields and the ability of those experts to decide what's best for the masses.
What you're probably thinking about now is, "Wait a second, what's the difference between having a small group of experts decide what's important for the masses, and a small group of people making value judgments for other cultures?" The short answer to that is in the optimistic presumption that public education works. Given the option to study any chosen field, there will be a natural, democratic filtering of sorts of the masses, and it's having those choices, those opportunities, through which the democratic process works much more effectively than in just terms of voting every four or five years for the least worst candidate.
That's what really ticks me off about the interference of that democratic process by special interest groups, such as computer manufacturers, who exploit the inevitable reality that the masses can be easily duped by superficial criteria. The main incentive for computer manufacturers interfering is to increase their profits, not a philanthropic desire to assist in the education of young people. That's exactly the same deal with making computers for developing countries: the priority is profit, not food, not shelter, not maintaining the cultural integrity of entire nations, but rather to draw unexpecting people into the fold of consumerism regardless of what the real cost may be to those people individually and collectively.