Knowledge
Meet Sugata Mitra who feels primary education may not need teachers
Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments in the slums of New Delhi found that children aged 6 – 12 with no prior experience with computers intuitively figured out how to operate the machine, overcoming both language barriers and educational gaps in the process.
Dr. Sugata Mitra is a long-term educationist and an international scientist. His repertoire boasts of over 25 inventions and path breaking applications in of Cognitive Science, Information Science and Education Technology. Dr. Mitra has been the Chief Scientist at NIIT and currently a Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, UK.
His numerous accolades are testimony to his silent demeanour yet a restless mind which is constantly working to educate underprivileged children across the world. His numerous trophies include "Man of Peace Award" from Together for Peace Foundation, USA, "Social Innovation Award" from Institute of Social Inventions, UK along with the "Dewang Mehta Award" by the Indian Government for his work related to Hole-in-the-Wall experiments.
His “Hole in the Wall” experiments in the slums of New Delhi include placing a computer in a wall, connecting it to the Internet, and waiting to see what would happen. There were no instructors, just free access to a world of information online. The results were amazing, he found children aged 6 – 12 who had no prior experience with computers intuitively figured out how to operate the machine, overcoming both language barriers and educational gaps in the process. In fact, they went on to teach each other based on the interest of their peers.
Sugata was fascinated with the idea of unsupervised learning and computers as early as 1982. However, finally, in 1999, he took to field testing. On 26th January, the republic day of India, Dr. Mitra's team carved a "hole in the wall" that separated the NIIT office where he worked from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Through this hole, a freely accessible computer was put up. The computer was an instant hit among the slum dwellers, especially the children. With no prior experience of computers, the children took to operating them as fish take to water. This prompted Dr. Mitra to propose the following hypothesis:
The acquisition of basic computing skills by any set of children can be achieved through incidental learning provided the learners are given access to a suitable computing facility, with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guidance.
Encouraged by the success of the New Delhi experiment, the experiment was replicated in Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh and in Madantusi in Uttar Pradesh. The findings from the 2 new locations confirmed the results of the initial experiment. It appeared that the children in these 2 places picked up computer skills without any guidance or instruction. Sugata even coined a term for this new way of learning – Minimally Invasive Education.
To further isolate how the children tackled the problem ignorance of the English language, the experiment was conducted in a northeastern village of Madantusi, where, for some reason, there was no English teacher, so the children had not learned English at all. A similar hole-in-the-wall was built and the kiosks were stacked with a lot of CDs as the village had no internet access. 3 months later the results were astonishing.
Suagata found 2 children aged 8 and 12-year-olds glued to the screen, engrossed in playing a game. And as soon as they saw the professor they said, "We need a faster processor and a better mouse." Besides being amusing, it was a light bulb moment as they claimed to have picked it up by reading the CD covers. Not only this, the children interacting with the computers had actually picked up 200 English words, many of them mispronounced yet with the absolute correct usage. So, the Madantusi experiment showed that language is not a barrier; in fact children may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to.
The true test of a successful experiment is its repetitive verification of the result time after time. This was demonstrated across 30 such clusters of computers or Learning Stations that have been set up in India and abroad in collaboration with International Finance Corporation. The results have been uniformly encouraging, and consistently show that children learn to operate as well as play with computers with minimum intervention.
So what was the conclusion over the 6 years of work? It was amply clear that primary education has the potential to happen on its own, or some parts of it can happen unaided. It does not have to be imposed. Learners, children more so have the potential to self-organize and attain an educational objective.