Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
What is going to be the future of learning?
but in order for me to tell you what that plan is,
I need to tell you a little story,
where did the kind of learning we do in schools,
And you can look far back into the past,
but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is,
it's quite easy to figure out where it came from.
It came from about 300 years ago,
and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"]
Imagine trying to run the show,
trying to run the entire planet,
without computers, without telephones,
with data handwritten on pieces of paper,
But the Victorians actually did it.
They created a global computer
It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine.
In order to have that machine running,
you need lots and lots of people.
They made another machine to produce those people:
The schools would produce the people
who would then become parts of the
bureaucratic administrative machine.
They must be identical to each other.
They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten;
and they must be able to do multiplication,
division, addition and subtraction in their head.
They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand
and he would be instantly functional.
The Victorians were great engineers.
They engineered a system that was so robust
that it's still with us today,
continuously producing identical people
for a machine that no longer exists.
so what are we doing with that design
that produces these identical people,
and what are we going to do next
if we ever are going to do anything else with it?
["Schools as we know them are obsolete"]
So that's a pretty strong comment there.
I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete.
I'm not saying they're broken.
It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken.
It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed.
It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.
What are the kind of jobs that we have today?
Well, the clerks are the computers.
They're there in thousands in every office.
And you have people who guide those computers
Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand.
They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads.
They do need to be able to read.
In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.
Well, that's today, but we don't even know
what the jobs of the future are going to look like.
We know that people will work from wherever they want,
whenever they want, in whatever way they want.
How is present-day schooling going to prepare them
Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident.
I used to teach people how to write computer programs
And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum.
And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids
ever going to learn to write computer programs?
At the same time, we also had lots of parents,
rich people, who had computers,
and who used to tell me, "You know, my son,
because he does wonderful things with computers.
And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent."
And so on. So I suddenly figured that,
how come all the rich people are having
these extraordinarily gifted children?
(Laughter)
I made a hole in the boundary wall
of the slum next to my office,
and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen
if I gave a computer to children who never would have one,
didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.
It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?"
And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know."
(Laughter)
They said, "Why have you put it there?"
And they said, "Can we touch it?"I said, "If you wish to."
we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse.
So I said, "Well that's impossible, because --
How is it possible? They don't know anything."
My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution.
One of your students must have been passing by,
showed them how to use the mouse."
So I said, "Yeah, that's possible."
So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi
where the chances of a passing software development engineer
I repeated the experiment there.
There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in,
I went away, came back after a couple of months,
found kids playing games on it.
"We want a faster processor and a better mouse."
(Laughter)
So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?"
And they said something very interesting to me.
In an irritated voice, they said,
"You've given us a machine that works only in English,
so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter)
That's the first time, as a teacher,
that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually.
Here's a short glimpse from those years.
That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall.
On your right is an eight-year-old.
To his left is his student. She's six.
And he's teaching her how to browse.
Then onto other parts of the country,
I repeated this over and over again,
getting exactly the same results that we were.
["Hole in the wall film - 1999"]
An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do.
And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is,
and said, "There's a processor inside."
I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything,
and I said, in nine months, a group of children
left alone with a computer in any language
will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.
I'd seen it happen over and over and over again.
But I was curious to know, what else would they do
I started experimenting with other subjects,
among them, for example, pronunciation.
There's one community of children in southern India
whose English pronunciation is really bad,
and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs.
I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer,
and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you say."
(Laughter)
They did that, and watch a little bit of this.
Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you.
Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face
of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her.
She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad
and may have tortured you about your credit card bills
in a very clear English accent.
So then people said, well, how far will it go?
I decided I would destroy my own argument
by creating an absurd proposition.
I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis.
Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said,
can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village
learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English
And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero.
I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months,
I'll go back, they'll get another zero.
I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers.
I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India.
I put in Hole in the Wall computers there,
downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication,
most of which I didn't understand.
The children came rushing, said, "What's all this?"
So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English."
So they said, "How can we understand such big English words
So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method,
so I applied that. I said, "I haven't the foggiest idea."
(Laughter)
"And anyway, I am going away."
(Laughter)
So I left them for a couple of months.
They'd got a zero. I gave them a test.
and the children trooped in and said, "We've understood nothing."
So I said, "Well, what did I expect?"
So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you
before you decided that you can't understand anything?"
So they said, "We haven't given up.
We look at it every single day."
So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens
and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?"
So a little girl who you see just now,
she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English,
she said, "Well, apart from the fact that
improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease,
we haven't understood anything else."
I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent
in two months in the tropical heat
with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know
doing something that's a decade ahead of their time.
Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm.
How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks.
I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had,
a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant
and she played with them all the time.
So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?"
So she says, "Absolutely not.
I didn't have science in school. I have no idea
what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you."
I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother."
Whenever they do anything, you just say,
'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that?
What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.'
So she did that for two more months.
The scores jumped to 50 percent.
with my control school in New Delhi,
a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher.
When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.
(Children speaking) Neurons ... communication.
I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff,
but what she was saying, as you could make out,
was about neurons, with her hands were like that,
and she was saying neurons communicate.
At 12.
So what are jobs going to be like?
Well, we know what they're like today.
What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today,
children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand
and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand.
Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all?
Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something,
you can find out in two minutes?
Could it be -- a devastating question,
a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte --
could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in
a future where knowing is obsolete?
But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens.
Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes.
It took nature 100 million years
It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.
But we have to integrate that into our own future.
Encouragement seems to be the key.
if you look at all of the experiments that I did,
it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning.
There is evidence from neuroscience.
The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain,
when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else,
it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn,
Punishment and examinations are seen as threats.
We take our children, we make them shut their brains down,
Why did they create a system like that?
There was an age in the Age of Empires
when you needed those people who can survive under threat.
When you're standing in a trench all alone,
if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed.
But the Age of Empires is gone.
What happens to creativity in our age?
We need to shift that balance back
I came back to England looking for British grandmothers.
I put out notices in papers saying,
if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera,
can you give me one hour of your time per week for free?
I got 200 in the first two weeks.
I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter)
They're called the Granny Cloud.
The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet.
If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran.
She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out.
I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles
deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India,
She does it with only one age-old gesture.
"Shhh."
Okay?
Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it.
Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man.
Grandmother: Well done! Very good.
I think what we need to look at is
as the product of educational self-organization.
If you allow the educational process to self-organize,
It's not about making learning happen.
The teacher sets the process in motion
and then she stands back in awe
and watches as learning happens.
I think that's what all this is pointing at.
But how will we know? How will we come to know?
these Self-Organized Learning Environments.
They are basically broadband, collaboration
and encouragement put together.
I've tried this in many, many schools.
It's been tried all over the world, and teachers
sort of stand back and say, "It just happens by itself?"
And I said, "Yeah, it happens by itself.""How did you know that?"
I said, "You won't believe the children who told me
because remember, there's no teacher around.
Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons -- SM: Australia
Girl: -- giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge.
The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons
in the ion minus the number of electrons.
SM: A decade ahead of her time.
So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions.
You already heard about that. You know what that means.
There was a time when Stone Age men and women
used to sit and look up at the sky and say,
"What are those twinkling lights?"
They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions.
We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle.
The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say,
"If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth,
how would you figure out if it was going to or not?"
And if he says, "Well, what? how?"
you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle,"
and leave him alone. He'll figure it out.
So here are a couple of images from SOLEs.
I've tried incredible, incredible questions --
"When did the world begin? How will it end?" —
This one is about what happens to the air we breathe.
This is done by children without the help of any teacher.
The teacher only raises the question,
and then stands back and admires the answer.
that we design the future of learning.
We don't want to be spare parts
for a great human computer, do we?
So we need to design a future for learning.
I've got to get this wording exactly right,
because, you know, it's very important.
My wish is to help design a future of learning
by supporting children all over the world
to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together.
It will be called the School in the Cloud.
It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures
driven by the big questions which their mediators put in.
is to build a facility where I can study this.
It's a facility which is practically unmanned.
who manages health and safety.
The rest of it's from the cloud.
The lights are turned on and off by the cloud,
etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud.
But I want you for another purpose.
You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments
at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs.
It's very easy to do. There's a great document
produced by TED which tells you how to do it.
If you would please, please do it
then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds,
and create the future of learning.
I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas.
At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin,
I once built two Hole in the Wall computers,
and the children flocked there.
And there was this little girl who was following me around.
And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child.
I don't know, what should I do?"
And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly.
She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me,
I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Applause)