A $1 million bet on students without teachers - CNN.com
Long Beach, California (CNN) -- What if everything you thought you knew about education was wrong?
What if students learn more quickly on their own, working in teams, than in a classroom with a teacher?
What if tests and discipline get in the way of the learning process rather than accelerate it?
Those are the questions Sugata Mitra has been asking since the late 1990s, and for which he was awarded the $1 million TED Prize on Tuesday, the first day of the TED2013 conference.
Ted.com: Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud
Newcastle University professor Sugata Mitra won the 2013 TED Prize for his experiments in self-organized learning.Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, won the prize for his concept of "self organizing learning environments," an alternative to traditional schooling that relies on empowering students to work together on computers with broadband access to solve their own problems, with adults intervening to provide encouragement and admiration, rather than top-down instruction.
Mitra's work with students in India has gained wide attention and was the focus of a 2010 TED Talk on his "hole in the wall" experiment, showing the potential of computers to jump-start learning without any adult intervention.
Coming to education trained as a physicist, Mitra said he was encouraged by his boss to start teaching people how to write computer programs. When he bought his first personal computer, he was surprised to find that his 6-year-old son was able to tell him how to fix problems he had operating the machine. He thought his son was a genius, but then heard his friends saying the same thing about their children.
Thinking about children living in slums in New Delhi, he said, "It can't be possible that our sons are geniuses and they are not." Mitra set up a publicly accessible computer along the lines of a bank ATM, behind a glass barrier, and told children they could use it, with no further guidance.
They soon learned to browse the Web in English, even though they lacked facility in the language. To prove the experiment would work in an isolated environment, he set up another "hole in the wall" computer in a village 300 miles away. After a while, "one of the kids was saying we need a faster processor and a better mouse."
Rock singer Bono talked about the falling number of people living in extreme poverty.When the head of the World Bank came to see the experiment, Mitra said he encouraged him to go to the New Delhi slum and see for himself. After spending time with the children, bank President James Wolfensohn "came back and put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'How much?' " Mitra said he received $1.5 million, which allowed him to press on with experiments in India, Cambodia and Africa, finding self-organized learning worked to improve English-language pronunciation, reading comprehension and even the basics of DNA replication.
Mitra said the traditional system of education is largely based on the necessities created by Britain's colonial empire in which a vast amount of territory had to be governed by people writing things on paper and sending them around the world on ships. Schools turned out clerks who functioned as interchangeable parts in a vast bureaucracy where the skills of reading, writing and arithmetic were key.
He argues that today's world needs a new system in which the role of computers in aiding learning is paramount.
To help speed learning, Mitra has recruited hundreds of "grannies," volunteers from the United Kingdom, many of them retired teachers, who function more in the role of "grandparents" than teachers, skypeing into learning environments around the world, encouraging students to do their best and praising their achievements.
Richard Turere, 13, told TED attendees how he invented a system to protect his family's cattle from lions.With the TED Prize money, Mitra intends to build a laboratory, most likely in India, where he can test his theories through experiments that supplement schoolwork. He likens it to a "safe cybercafe for children" where they can strengthen their English skills, which can be a route to economic advancement.
Mitra said he doesn't think teachers are obsolete but suggests their roles may be changing as students increasingly have access to self-learning through computers. And he argues that his self-organized teams may be an alternative to regular schools in places where teachers may not be available.
Traditional education stresses tests and punishments, two things that Mitra said causes the brain to shut down its rational processes and surrender to fear. Adopting a method closer to that of grandparents, who shower children with admiration, is "the opposite of the parent method," which relies on threats, Mitra said.
The TED Prize announcement came at the end of an education-oriented first day of TED2013, a conference attended by 1,400 people from 50 countries that runs through Friday morning.
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Started in the 1980s as a conference on technology, entertainment and design, TED has grown into a far-reaching nonprofit that holds pricy conferences that draw business, nonprofit and political leaders (the fee to attend the Long Beach event is $7,500) but also distributes many of its talks freely on www.TED.com and licenses thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world.
Bono, a previous TED Prize winner, gave a talk in the opening session on the dramatic progress that's been made in fighting diseases such as AIDS and malaria and in curbing global poverty.
The rock star-turned-crusader for global change said he's become a "factivist" (an activist who revels in the facts) and sped through a PowerPoint style presentation showing that the number of people living in extreme poverty -- surviving on less than $1.25 a day -- has been cut in half and could plunge to zero by 2028 if dictatorships and corruption don't stand in the way of further progress. He noted that 2028 is "just around the corner," joking that it would be enough time for three more Rolling Stones farewell concerts.
Many of the first-day talks focused on education. Among them were:
• Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist at Columbia University who stressed that science isn't about accumulating facts but about learning enough so that we can expose our ignorance and ask the right questions.
• Freeman Hrabowski, the longtime president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has won acclaim for innovative approaches to education and research and for strengthening scientific and engineering education for minority students.
• And in perhaps the best example of self-organized learning, Richard Turere, a 13-year-old from Kenya, who figured out how to save his family's cows from marauding lions by inventing a system of lights to ward off the lions.
Usually I make ya click through, 'cause I think the organizations that post the stories deserve the traffic; I just want to share stuff that strikes a chord with me in one direction or another. But the concept in this article is so important, and makes such a huge difference, just this one shift in thinking, that it could change everything. When our educational system no longer runs within the limits of what we had to do in the past to have effective public education with little technology, when we utilize in education all the tools and resources we now have that we've never had before, it changes everything. Education - not rote learning in a classroom, but truly gaining knowledge and experience, and being able to segue those things into wisdom - allows us to flourish, and to utilize all of our capabilities, individually and as a group. How about, instead of our Discovery Center sitting quiet much of the time, then bustling with too much activity as waves of classes come through, and then sitting idle again while people are at work and at school, how about if working parents drop their kids off at the friends' houses with the stay-at-home parents in their neighborhood, the ones they know and trust, some of whom are teachers by trade, perhaps (or with whomever they like, but not a school or daycare unless that's what that family feels is best; no need to get rid of either entirely if those types of institutions continue to serve a purpose), and those small groups choose what they'll do that day, they get the kids arranged, these want to go there, those want to do that, these want to build this, whatever, let them work with adults who've been in those fields or who curate those buildings and learn directly from their expertise, let teachers teach, either in schools for the many people who enjoy that learning environment or as tutors in the field, or both. Teachers would have far more flexibility, too, and more opportunities to trade in classroom work from time to time for some real world time, either in their chosen field if they have one, or just working with kids in less conventional settings, tutoring for a while, whatever recharges the appetite for learning that makes them such good teachers. Teachers will always be essential as long as humans want to learn, and when we stop wanting to learn we'll no longer be human so... But anyway, I'm just sayin' all that to say, that's why I'm posting this whole article here instead of cuttin' it off and makin' ya click through. Most people who don't think they want to learn feel that way because at some point they got so frustrated with the process that they gave up. Many people who learn well in school find themselves lost in the real world, because it doesn't work like that (unless you went to Harvard Business School or another one of the ivies, because I think they give a little behind-the-scenes look into the more cutthroat aspects of business in a capitalist system than a lot of us ever get). Who, given the opportunity and an environment that works for them, doesn't want to learn?
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