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.
You don't teach morals and ethics and empathy and kindness in the schools. You teach that at home, and children learn by example.
I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.
The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.
The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves.
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
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