We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a desire to revolutionize education and encourage children to learn collaboratively using their natural curiosity.
Sugata Mitra's quote emphasizes the importance of nurturing children's innate curiosity and creativity in learning. He envisions a future where children can engage with information and mentorship online, advocating for innovative learning spaces like the 'School in the Cloud' in India. By inviting others to create their own child-driven learning environments, he underscores the potential for collective exploration and intellectual adventure in education, aiming to inspire a global movement towards more empowering and collaborative learning.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a conference on educational reform, this quote can inspire others to create innovative learning environments.
More from Sugata Mitra
All quotes →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.
Similar quotes
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.
When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you.