Sugata Mitra

We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.

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.

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.

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.

If children have interest, then Education happens

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.

Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.

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?

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.

Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning.

My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.

It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.

My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer.

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.