Computers to Revolutionize Education & Destroy Ignorance

     "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain 

(Note: there is only weak evidence that Mark Twain actually said this, but it gets the point across)

     The purpose of the above quote is mostly for provocative intentions. Could it be that our current school systems are no longer relevant?

     I am now in my last semester of college and I often evaluate my own education - from primary to post-secondary - and my evaluation looks like this: I learned a great amount in various subjects, but the amount of learning I retained in a particular subject was directly dictated by the amount of interest I had in that given subject and more importantly the amount of interest I had for learning in general.

     "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." -Mahatma Gandhi

     Gandhi understood that learning is about attitude. For learning to take place, one must desire to learn.

     This is where Dr. Sugata Mitra enters the picture with his vision of using computers to revolutionize the education system.

     Mitra is best known for his Hole-in-the-Wall experiment, where he put freely accessible computers in remote villages and slums in New Delhi and just left it alone. Children with no prior experience and who knew no English became computer literate on their own, and taught themselves enough English to use email, chat and search engines.

A Hole-in-the-Wall computer. (Source)

     He then took the experiment further and tested their ability to learn advanced subjects, like say the biotechnology of DNA replication in English. In that particular experiment, children 8-12 years old went from scoring 0% in their knowledge to 30% in just two months. Dr. Mitra then hired a local accountant to simply stand behind the children as they learned and say things like, "How did you do that? Wow, that is incredible."   In other words - encouragement was added to the equation. That brought their scores up to 50%. Children could learn subjects a decade ahead of their time in this style of learning environment.

     So how spectacular of an idea is this? Well, Sugata Mitra just won the 2013 TED Prize (TED is a conference of elite intellectuals and tech-buffs dedicated to supporting awesome ideas) of $1 million to further research this new concept of schooling.

     As laid out in his award speech at TED, Mitra wants to set up self organized learning environments (SOLE) that consist of:

    Give children a computer with access to the internet, and have their teacher simply ask them a question to induce learning and the children will teach themselves the answer. Mitra has already had great success with his first SOLE environments and is now asking parents and teachers to set-up their own SOLE's and experience it themselves. You can even send him the data as part of the experiment and simultaneously enter a contest.

     A major point that Mitra makes in his speech is that our current school systems are centered around tests and examinations, but he points to evidence in neuroscience that says that punishments and examinations are seen as threats and threats shut down the prefontal cortex - the part of the brain that learns - the lesson being that we need to completely rethink how schools are approached. Our society is no longer about having knowledge, but about knowing how to find information quickly, so why are our schools still focused on the former?

Sugata Mitra, being a genius at TED.

     What I think Mitra gets so right is the total integration of schools and computers. Jobs in the future are going to be all about computers, and using them to make your life easier and better. So why then are they hardly used in school? Mitra brings up this point: our children now are using smartphones and tablets before and after school for all kinds of reasons and then we take them to school where they are not allowed to use them and instead given books.

     God bless you, Sugata Mitra, and your love of computers. If you want to be inspired, watch his entire award speech here.

     Computers are (and will continue) revolutionizing education and destroying ignorance everywhere.

     Computers - 3. Evil - 0.