Sugata Mitra Quotes

People are adamant learning is not just looking at a Google page. But it is. Learning is looking at Google pages. What is wrong with that?

We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children‘s innate quest for information and understanding.

Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning.

Education prepares to be one piece of a machine.

Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they’re learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer.

Learning is the new skill. Imagination, creation and asking new questions are at its core.

Too many pupils at schools in the U.K. want to have careers as footballers or TV hosts, or models, because that’s what they’re constantly exposed to as the heroes of our time.

Go to a job interview and tell and employer that you can recite the 17 times table; they don’t care. Why are we still teaching it?

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.

Teachers say to me, ‘The internet is full of rubbish, wrong answers.’ But you would be surprised how just long it takes to find wrong information on Google, and where it’s not obvious that it’s wrong.

I don’t even want to guess at what computer literacy might do to children, except to say that if cyberspace is considered a place, then there are people who are already in it and people who are not in it.

You can force students to learn, to a certain extent, but students aren’t happy and employers aren’t happy.

My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.

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.

In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain – to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

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.