Notice: ob_end_flush(): Failed to delete and flush buffer. No buffer to delete or flush in /home1/ntptuqmy/public_html/quotes/includes/header_html.php on line 6 Sugata Mitra Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database
It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.
I don't mind children cribbing answers off other children. It's one of the ways they can learn. I also don't think there should be too many constraints on what they can look at on the Internet.
Too many pupils at schools in the U.K. want to have careers as footballers or TV hosts, or models, because that's what they're constantly exposed to as the heroes of our time.
There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.
The Indian education system, like the Indian bureaucratic system, is Victorian and still in the 19th century. Our schools are still designed to produce clerks for an empire that does not exist anymore.
I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web.
Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they're learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer.
Teachers say to me, 'The internet is full of rubbish, wrong answers.' But you would be surprised how just long it takes to find wrong information on Google, and where it's not obvious that it's wrong.
Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers.
Too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.
In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.
I don't even want to guess at what computer literacy might do to children, except to say that if cyberspace is considered a place, then there are people who are already in it and people who are not in it.
Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.
