Sugata Mitra: The Child-Driven Education TED Talk Review

In 1999 Sugata Mitra placed a computer in the wall of a building in a slum of New Deli. The children of this slum were given free use of this computer and Internet without any training or tutorial. When Mitra returned two months later the children had taught each other how to use the computer, as well as the Internet and were playing computer games they had found online and downloaded themselves.

For years after he continued this "Hole in the Wall" experiment across the global, where he simply gave students access to a computer, a task to complete, and left them alone to figure it out. His results were amazing; Italian students who did not speak English, given directions in English to find information about Pythagrium Theory and students from South India teaching themselves Biotechnology in English, scoring better on the Biotechnology examination then students at a private school with an accredited Biotechnology teacher.

So as students entering the teaching profession should we be scared? Will we all be replaced by computers? Doubtful. During his talk Mitra states, "A teacher who can be replaced by a computer should be, however, he is in no way arguing against teachers, he instead is pointing to what he thinks makes his program so effective.

When Mitra began fine tuning his experiment he had the children work in small groups, sharing one computer. He did this purposefully, forcing the children to discuss and interpret the information with their peers, putting it in terms they understood. This helped the information stick. When working with UK students, he gave the class a set of questions which the students had to use the computer to answer, the class average was 76%. When he returned two months later he tested the students on the same information, minus the computer and the class average was, again, 76%. Through this unstructured communication the students were able to not just find, but learn the information in terms they understood.

Mitra also implemented into his program the "grandmother method" in which students are constantly praised for their progress. The students are positively reinforced through praise as they work which helps them to continue to work and learn which ever way they please.

Both of these tactics, having students interpret information into their own words and positive reinforcement are two things any effective teacher should do, but does this process work for everyone?  Mitra said at the beginning of his talk, "children will learn to do, what they want to do", but is it that simple? Can every child learn to do anything as long as they want to learn it? The special educator part of me would like to argue no. This process shows amazing results for general education students, but how did students with learning disabilities do? Mitra gave us the average score of the UK students, but what was the lowest score? How many of these students fell below the 76%?

As a closing though Mitra summed up his thesis to "Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon." It's a very valid definition. The information input can vary greatly person to person, yet we each emerge from our education system knowing very similar things. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could turn one's learning process into a science equation? If we could discover a way to find out how each person's self organizing system worked? The possibilities could be limitless.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html