Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitrais Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at the for-profit training company NIIT. He won the TED Prize 2013...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth12 February 1952
CountryIndia
imagination memorization students
Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.
quite
It's quite fashionable to say that the educational system is broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore.
learning threatened
Too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.
job recite teaching
Go to a job interview and tell and employer that you can recite the 17 times table; they don't care. Why are we still teaching it?
books contained decide financial human knowledge operate points powers schools stored
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.
considered cyberspace except might people
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.
fear focused information innate quest
We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
entertainment
Entertainment can be a more powerful driver than poverty.
alone children computer left nine office reach secretary standard
In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer - in any language - would reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.
clerks designed education empire exist produce schools
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.