“Where did language come from?”
With that he retreats into a corner. Groups of children begin trawling the Internet in search of answers. They consult feverishly with each other, venturing to other groups to find out what they’re doing. Occasionally, a child moves from one group to another.
The man steps forward a little later to ask the children what they’ve found.
“Language comes from the evolution of humankind and how the body is shaped,” ventures a member of one of the groups. “But,” adds another, “they would not have tried to produce sounds if they hadn’t been trying to express their feelings.”
“We’ve observed this happening in classrooms across the world,” whispers Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, UK.
These are concepts that are far beyond their age, yet the children have arrived at them on their own. “Is this a good way to learn?” Mitra asks them. “Yes,” say the children in unison.
It’s a validation of what this 61-year-old professor, winner of the $1 million TED 2013 Prize, has been saying for the last 13 years. Learning in children, he believes, is something that happens almost naturally, a ‘self-organising system’. The lower the adult intervention, the more children are likely to learn.
Mitra is an anachronism in an age that emphasises academic certification and extreme specialisation. He’s part polymath, part dissenter, and perhaps, part visionary.
While studying solid state physics at IIT Delhi in the late 1970s, he discovered that the structure of organic molecules has a greater role in determining their function than their constituent atoms. He then moved on to study energy storage systems, resulting in a new design for zinc-chloride batteries.
This segued into an interest in the way electricity flows through biological systems, which led to a paper that speculated on why human sense organs are located where they are.
Sometime in the ’80s, he’d also developed an interest in computer networking. “I just drifted into it,” he says, “At that time the only people who could create computer programmes were theoretical physicists.”
In 1990, he joined NIIT, where he started work on creating curricula, inventing learning devices and researching new methods of teaching computer programming, which was fast becoming a subject of choice for students around the country.
That was where, one day in 1999, he decided to try an experiment. Computers had entered big schools in every city, and were changing the way children were taught. Would they be of any use to poorer children who had either no access to education or went to schools where the teachers were disinterested and the infrastructure poor, he wondered.
Abutting the wall of his office compound was a slum, the kids of which, even in the off chance that they did go to school, had certainly never used a computer. Mitra bludgeoned a hole in it, into which he stuck a computer. A separate smaller hole housed a track pad. On the computer was an array of educational games and software.
The slum children were quick to explore. Groups of them gathered around this new machine that functioned in a language that none of them knew. It did not take them long, Mitra discovered, to learn to operate it. They fiddled, taught each other and exchanged ideas. In the matter of a few weeks, they’d figured out how the games worked, and more tantalisingly, had even picked up a smattering of English.
Could this be a solution for schools in rural India where there were few good teachers?
To answer this, Mitra set himself an “impossible task”. He would take this “hole in the wall”, as his experiment had come to be known, to a group of 12-year-old Tamil speaking children. Would they, having been left alone with some software on basic biology (a subject they had not studied) in English(a language they did not know) pass a standard test?
They did.
And with a little help from an adult, who played the part of a doting granny who may not understand a subject but nevertheless encourages and praises her grandchild’s efforts, they did even better. In fact, they did as well as children in rich, urban schools.
Mitra took these experiments to other parts of the world — Italy, Cambodia, Latin America. Everywhere, he got the same results.
It confirmed a suspicion that had been growing on him — that our current methods of education were indoctrinating and outmoded, a remnant of an “age of empires” during which they served to produce uniformity.
That age had passed. What we needed now was a new paradigm of ‘minimally invasive education’, where children would be left to “rub shoulders” with each other and an Internet-connected computer. With this, they would ‘teach’ themselves.
The first experimental steps towards this have already been taken in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where these ‘self-organised learning environments’ have been set up. The goal in this case is for the children to teach themselves English. The grannies here are a group of 200 moderators, most of them actual British grannies, who over Skype, work with the children.
This, spread across subjects, is Mitra’s vision of what he refers to as the ‘school in the cloud’. He plans to use the TED prize money to set up such a facility in India within the next two years.
Mitra is, however, emphatic that this is a work in progress. Many more experiments need to be done, and in its initial form, the ‘school in the cloud’ will augment the current educational system rather than replace it.
One of the biggest problems with his system, he confesses, is measuring the results in the children. The only yardsticks he has are exams that originate in the same system of ‘rote’ learning that he is so critical of.
Nor is it clear how these individual experiments will scale up to a whole unsystemic ‘system’.
But that they will, he seems sure.
At every TED talk he’s given, Mitra has, with childlike enthusiasm, quoted a line from a conversation he had with Arthur C Clarke, where the science fiction writer told him, “If a teacher can be replaced with a machine, he should be.” Students, it seems, are their own best teachers.
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