SugataMitraBuildaSchoolintheCloud.docx

1、SugataMitraBuildaSchoolintheCloudWhat is going to be the future of learning?I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind of sets the stage.I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from?

2、 And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, its quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. The British Empire Imagine trying to run the s

3、how, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. Its still with us today. Its called the bure

4、aucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical

5、 to each other. They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealan

6、d and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional. The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that its still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are we doing with th

7、at design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it?Schools as we know them are obsoleteSo thats a pretty strong comment there. I said schools as we know them now, theyre obsolete. Im not saying theyre broken. Its quite fa

8、shionable to say that the education systems broken. Its not broken. Its wonderfully constructed. Its just that we dont need it anymore. Its outdated. What are the kind of jobs that we have today? Well, the clerks are the computers. Theyre there in thousands in every office. And you have people who g

9、uide those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people dont need to be able to write beautifully by hand. They dont need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.Well, thats today, but we dont even know w

10、hat the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach peop

11、le how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who

12、 had computers, and who used to tell me, You know, my son, I think hes gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter - oh, surely she is extra-intelligent. And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children?

13、 (Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didnt know any English, didnt know what the Internet was.The children came

14、 running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said, What is this?And I said, Yeah, its, I dont know. (Laughter)They said, Why have you put it there?I said, Just like that.And they said, Can we touch it? I said, If you wish to.And I went away. About eight hours later, we found them browsing

15、 and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, Well thats impossible, because - How is it possible? They dont know anything.My colleagues said, No, its a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse.So I said, Yeah, thats possible.So I repeate

16、d the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of month

17、s, found kids playing games on it.When they saw me, they said, We want a faster processor and a better mouse.(Laughter)So I said, How on Earth do you know all this?And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, Youve given us a machine that works only in English, s

18、o we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it. (Laughter) Thats the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word teach ourselves said so casually.Heres a short glimpse from those years. Thats the first day at the Hole in the Wall. On your right is an eight-year-old. To his left is hi

19、s student. Shes six. And hes teaching her how to browse. Then onto other parts of the country, I repeated this over and over again, getting exactly the same results that we were. Hole in the wall film - 1999 An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. And finally a girl explaining in Mara

20、thi what it is, and said, Theres a processor inside.So I started publishing. I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, 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. Id se

21、en it happen over and over and over again.But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? I started experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. Theres one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad,

22、and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs. I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, Keep talking into it until it types what you say. (Laughter) They did that, and watch a little bit of this.Computer: Nice to meet you. Child: Nice to meet you.Suga

23、ta Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her. She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent.So then people said, well, how far will it go? Where

24、 does it stop? I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition. I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis. Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a s

25、treetside computer? And I said, Ill measure them. Theyll get a zero. Ill spend a couple of months, Ill leave it for a couple of months, Ill go back, theyll get another zero. Ill go back to the lab and say, we need teachers. I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. I put in Hol

26、e in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didnt understand.The children came rushing, said, Whats all this?So I said, Its very topical, very important. But its all in English.So they said, How can we understand such big Engl

27、ish words and diagrams and chemistry?So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, I havent the foggiest idea. (Laughter) And anyway, I am going away. (Laughter)So I left them for a couple of months. Theyd got a zero. I gave them a test. I came back after two months

28、 and the children trooped in and said, Weve understood nothing.So I said, Well, what did I expect? So I said, Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided that you cant understand anything?So they said, We havent given up. We look at it every single day.So I said, What? You dont understand

29、these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?So a little girl who you see just now, she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English, she said, Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we havent understood anythin

30、g else.(Laughter) (Applause)So I tested them. I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didnt know doing something thats a decade ahead of their time. Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. Thi

31、rty percent is a fail. How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks. I couldnt find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time.So I asked this girl, Can you help them?So she says, Absolutely not

32、. I didnt have science in school. I have no idea what theyre doing under that tree all day long. I cant help you.I said, Ill tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother.So she says, Whats that?I said, Stand behind them. Whenever they do anything, you just say, Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? Whats the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that. You know what grannies do.So she did that for two more months. The scores jumped to 5