February 27, 2013
Sugata Mitra gave street kids in a slum in New
Delhi access to a computer connected to the Internet, and found that they
quickly taught themselves how to use it. This was the moment he says he
discovered a new way of teaching.
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| Sugata Mitra |
He calls it the grandmother technique, and it
goes like this: expose a half dozen or so kids to a computer, and let them have
at it. The only supervision required is an adult to listen the kids brag about
what they learn. It’s the opposite, he says, of the disciplinary ways of many parents—more
like a kindly grandmother, who rewards curiosity with acceptance and
encouragement. And it is a challenge to the past century and a half of
formalized schooling.
Since this first experience in 1999, Mitra has
been working to extend the notion of self-organized learning to address the
needs of poor children, especially in developing countries, who have little or
no educational resources. He is convinced that school children can teach
themselves just about anything—that they can achieve educational objectives
without formal direction. For these kids, formal education, at least as
practiced in the U.K., where he is professor of educational technology at
Newcastle University, is of little help.
His ideas, however, have implications for
formal education in the west, too. Mitra doesn’t have kind words for English
schooling, which he says is better suited to the needs of the British empire
than the age of Twitter. England ran three quarters of the globe through a vast
bureaucracy that relied on the ability of clerks to write letters and tally
spreadsheets by hand. Competency in reading, writing and arithmetic was
paramount, and formal classroom teaching was the best way to instill the three
Rs. But as the tools of education have changed radically, schooling
hasn’t. The British system, he says,
“was a phenomenal achievement, but it’s out of date. It’s not needed.”
The question is, what is needed—or what will be
needed in the future? Mitra thinks self-organized learning will be an important
part. “There may be 10 different ways to do this. I believe I have touched on
one of the ways.”
Last night Mitra won the $1 million TED Prize
for his work. He will use the money to establish a lab in New Delhi that will
put his ideas of a “School in the Cloud” to the test. The lab will be set up as
a kind of cyber café, where 48 kids at any one time can go to learn English,
considered in India to be key to any child’s future. Volunteer
“grandmothers”—retired school teachers, for the most part—will participate via
Skype to lend guidance. The cyber café will serve as a lab to see how
self-organized learning can be scaled globally. “I want to see if this is
feasible,” he says. “What are the technical problems, what are the management
problems? If it works, we’ll have a technique that will level the playing
field, and that is the big missing piece.”
Self-organized learning is potentially
disruptive to traditional education in the west, and in talking about it Mitra
has alienated some teachers. For now, he’s keeping to the developing world, and
to the teaching of English.
His long-term ambitions go further, however.
“My agenda,” he says, “is to see how far this can go.”
Source: Scientific American
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