We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
Sugata MitraRead
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.
Interpretation
Children can achieve significant skills in technology independently within a short time frame.
This quote by Sugata Mitra highlights the incredible potential of self-directed learning, particularly in the context of digital literacy. It suggests that when given access to a computer and the freedom to explore, children can autonomously acquire skills comparable to those of trained professionals, demonstrating the power of technology to democratize education and learning opportunities across different cultures and backgrounds.
In practice
In a discussion about modern education methods at a conference.
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.
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.
There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.
The hand is, in the highest degree, a human characteristic. It is man's organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth.
Education is the proper way to promote compassion and tolerance in society. Compassion and peace of mind bring a sense of confidence that reduce stress and anxiety, whereas anger and hatred come from frustration and undermine our sense of trust. Because of ignorance, many of our problems are our own creation. Education, however, is the instrument that increases our ability to employ our own intelligence.
In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.
We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.
The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know.
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