Repeat after me:
Shiny toys do not teach your children.
Computers do not teach your children.
Books do not teach your children.
Omega-3 in their diet does not teach your children.
The RPi is a tool. In the right hands it's useful. But it's sold many times more as a cheap geek toy for projects than anything to do with education. How do I know? I have a first batch Pi. I work in schools. I bought it to trial it. We never even put it near a classroom. Sure, we could have, but it's no different to the netbooks, tablets, or any other fad that has come along - posh hardware looks nice on parent's evening, but doesn't actually teach anything.
Mine has been sitting in the attic for months. Mainly because of problems that you shouldn't have to deal with on such a device (The USB shares bus-bandwidth with something else - the SD or the Ethernet I can't remember - and as such can lose USB packets [read: All your devices crash and stop working] silently without any clue what went wrong... it's a hardware problem that recent firmwares try to workaround by tweaking some settings but nothing that can be resolved. The posts on this from the first few weeks of RPi bug reporting are still open).
And there is zero effort to actually teach schools how to use it. If it appears at BETT it's as a faddy device on some third-party stall to make you buy it for no good reason, and with few resources to use it. The kind of teachers we have nowadays, that means it's dead in the water. The ones who can make their own resources are few and far between and, let's be honest, don't need fancy gadgets to do those things anyway. They'd be able to teach them with a washing up bottle and double-sided sticky tape.
It's an interesting gadget, but nothing that didn't exist before (BeagleBoards, et al), or hasn't existed since (there are now a myriad of clones, and even Intel has pushed one out recently that's x86-compatible). It has quirks and problems, and it's not really designed for younger kids handling. The older kids using them all have Java-based smartphones, some of them running on Linux, but we're taking them away from the kids at registration and forcing them to cobble together some mish-mash of junk onto a PCB and then get happy when they make a Scratch program they've written in the IT suite run on it. Hell, my five-year-old has a Nexus tablet.
It was sold as "for schools" but it's anything but. As pointed out, there was a point where it was assumed the community would just "step up" and provide all this for free. What happened instead is all us geeks (who didn't grow up with this kind of hardware, or even the luxury of GCSE electronics) bought one, turned it into an in-car PC, and soldered our own circuits to it.
It's a tool. Without someone to use it properly, it's worthless. The people who can use it properly almost always would choose a BETTER tool (i.e. a PC or even a smartphone) to do what they want.
And it doesn't make your children any brighter than spending tens of thousands on bunch of swanky tablets that they all have at home anyway.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
