{"id":102280,"date":"2013-03-07T16:00:40","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T10:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=102280"},"modified":"2013-03-07T16:00:40","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T10:30:40","slug":"teachers-leave-them-kids-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/teachers-leave-them-kids-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"Teachers, Leave Them Kids Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Virtually<\/a>
Virtually smart Mitra with the children in front of one of the \u2018hole-in-the-wall\u2019 centres, at Madangir colony, New Delhi. Photo: NIIT<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nA portly frizzy haired man enters a classroom full of 10-year-old children. \u201cI\u2019m going to give you a question which I have not thought about yet,\u201d he says with a wide smile. The children look bewildered. \u201cIt\u2019s a question to which I would not have the answer,\u201d he continues, \u201cyou\u2019re going to find the answer.\u201d
\n\u201cWhere did language come from?\u201d
\nWith 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\u2019re doing. Occasionally, a child moves from one group to another.
\nThe man steps forward a little later to ask the children what they\u2019ve found.
\n\u201cLanguage comes from the evolution of humankind and how the body is shaped,\u201d ventures a member of one of the groups. \u201cBut,\u201d adds another, \u201cthey would not have tried to produce sounds if they hadn\u2019t been trying to express their feelings.\u201d
\n\u201cWe\u2019ve observed this happening in classrooms across the world,\u201d whispers Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, UK.
\nThese are concepts that are far beyond their age, yet the children have arrived at them on their own. \u201cIs this a good way to learn?\u201d Mitra asks them. \u201cYes,\u201d say the children in unison.
\nIt\u2019s 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 \u2018self-organising system\u2019. The lower the adult intervention, the more children are likely to learn.
\nMitra is an anachronism in an age that emphasises academic certification and extreme specialisation. He\u2019s part polymath, part dissenter, and perhaps, part visionary.
\nWhile 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.
\nThis 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.
\nSometime in the \u201980s, he\u2019d also developed an interest in computer networking. \u201cI just drifted into it,\u201d he says, \u201cAt that time the only people who could create computer programmes were theoretical physicists.\u201d
\nIn 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.
\nThat 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.
\nAbutting 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.
\nThe 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\u2019d figured out how the games worked, and more tantalisingly, had even picked up a smattering of English.
\nCould this be a solution for schools in rural India where there were few good teachers?
\nTo answer this, Mitra set himself an \u201cimpossible task\u201d. He would take this \u201chole in the wall\u201d, 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?
\nThey did.
\nAnd 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\u2019s efforts, they did even better. In fact, they did as well as children in rich, urban schools.
\nMitra took these experiments to other parts of the world \u2014 Italy, Cambodia, Latin America. Everywhere, he got the same results.
\nIt confirmed a suspicion that had been growing on him \u2014 that our current methods of education were indoctrinating and outmoded, a remnant of an \u201cage of empires\u201d during which they served to produce uniformity.
\nThat age had passed. What we needed now was a new paradigm of \u2018minimally invasive education\u2019, where children would be left to \u201crub shoulders\u201d with each other and an Internet-connected computer. With this, they would \u2018teach\u2019 themselves.
\nThe first experimental steps towards this have already been taken in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where these \u2018self-organised learning environments\u2019 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.
\nThis, spread across subjects, is Mitra\u2019s vision of what he refers to as the \u2018school in the cloud\u2019. He plans to use the TED prize money to set up such a facility in India within the next two years.
\nMitra is, however, emphatic that this is a work in progress. Many more experiments need to be done, and in its initial form, the \u2018school in the cloud\u2019 will augment the current educational system rather than replace it.
\nOne 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 \u2018rote\u2019 learning that he is so critical of.
\nNor is it clear how these individual experiments will scale up to a whole unsystemic \u2018system\u2019.
\nBut that they will, he seems sure.
\nAt every TED talk he\u2019s 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, \u201cIf a teacher can be replaced with a machine, he should be.\u201d Students, it seems, are their own best teachers.
\nakshai@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Children learn best when they\u2019re given the chance to rely on their own resources, Sugata Mitra, winner of the TED 2013 prize, tells Akshai Jain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":102338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[9159,9185,479,3959,9186,5948,7570],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}