Sugata Mitra - Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning

Learning without school

By Nicholas Negroponte

Learning and teaching are not symmetrical. They are not the flip sides of the same coin, in spite of the fact that almost all papers and conversations on education assume they are.

The working assumption is this: Solve teaching and you will get learning. Even if true in part, it addresses only some kinds of learning and never really attempts to understand the learning of learning itself. And, of course, it does not apply to the 70 million children worldwide who do not even go to first grade.

I am constantly astonished and disappointed at the assumptions people make about education: how to achieve it, how to measure it, how to accelerate it where it exists and how to create it where it does not. The default model that most people use is called school, and that includes yet further assumptions. The most universal and blatantly false of them is that age segregation is a good idea. The idea that all 7-year-olds should study together, and then the next year do the same with 8-year-olds, is just a bad idea. It was designed only for the convenience of the institution. It is like public toilet stalls not going from floor to ceiling, for the convenience of the janitors.

Enter Sugata Mitra. He offers a very different view of learning, one which involves the collective learning of mixed ages, achieved without a teacher. He has shown that a critical mass of illiterate 10- to 12-year-olds can conduct exercises of a level of difficulty that would otherwise require an eighth- to 10th-grade education. He lets these children teach each other, self-organize and explore in a manner more akin to the organization of a sports team than of a classroom.

There is a great deal to learn from Sugatas 12 years of experience with the Hole in the Wall project. To me, the most notable idea is that children are far better at organizing themselves than we assume. Much of the world is discoverable, which is how we all learned from the time we were born until around age 5, when our more formal education began. We interacted with our environments to acquire language and common sense. We acquired so much knowledge during those years that we learned many things about manipulating the world and even some about manipulating our parents. Suddenly, at age 5, our learning was assumed to be different and was delivered to us, almost solely through being told by people and soon after by books.

Sugatas point is that a great deal of what we call education is now discoverable. If children can learn to read on their own (the topic of his next book), they can learn almost everything else on their own, too. Keep in mind, he does not mean one child by himself or herself; he means by a collective process. That can include adults, certainly, but in many places on this earth there are no adults with sufficient literacy to help.

Ask yourself what education means. We measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize useless content to meet that test. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails; and in developing nations, rote learning is worse than in the United States (believe it or not) and yet worse than in some nations we admire in Asia. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Learning math and spelling is far less important than learning the act of learning. That is what Sugatas children are doing, and that is what this book is about.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA