“If children have interest, then education happens.”
It’s that statement, by author Sir Arthur C. Clarke, which explains the inspiration behind an education revolution erupting in India.
Sugata Mitra, an education scientist and professor of educational technology at the University of Newcastle in England, believes children have the capability to orchestrate their own education. He doesn’t buy the notion that children must attend traditional schools to reap the benefits of an education. Instead, he’s confident that young students are able to figure things out on their own when given the right stimuli to catch their curiosity.
“Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon,” Mitra said in a recent TED talk.
According to Save The Children, 7 million children under the age of 14 in India do not have access to quality education, with 50 percent dropping out of elementary school before completion. The Smile Foundation, an organization dedicated to Indian children’s health and education, indicates that only 50 percent of all children have access to education.
A study published in 2012 highlighted the link between a lack of education and crime rates among children. Titled, “Children in India,” the report concluded that 57 percent of crime involving children as perpetrators in 2011 were committed by those living in poverty. Nearly 70 percent of the children found to be committing crimes did not have access to education — 11 percent were not illiterate.
Mitra sees this as an obvious problem.
A native of India, he knew that there were places in which teachers weren’t willing to travel, creating a perfect opportunity to implement a form of education he truly believed in.
“Good teachers don’t want to go to just those places where they’re needed the most,” he said.
That’s a belief supported by even those who don’t subscribe to Mitra’s line of thought. Ashish Singh, a senior lecturer at Azim Premji University, published a study highlighting the inequality of educational opportunities for Indian children, based on socioeconomic forces.
“The results suggest overall high level of inequality of educational opportunity with substantial geographical variations,” he wrote. “Inequality of opportunity in access to primary education reduced during the 1992-93 to 2005-06 but the reduction varied considerably across different geographical regions, which calls for regional focus apart from national level policy revisions.”
Mitra has a different idea to provide education to those children living in the geographically ill-equipped areas.
The form of education Mitra promotes is known as “minimally invasive education,” defined as “a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no, intervention by a teacher.”
A new wave of education
The idea is that, when left to their own devices — a computer — children will learn on their own.
Mitra’s dream became a reality when he created what is known as the “Hole-in-the-Wall” project in the slums of India. In 1999, Mitra set up a computer system in a New Dehli neighborhood.
The program began with one single computer imbedded in the wall of the slum. Located three feet above ground, it was intended to grab the attention of area youth — and it did.
The area Mitra chose to locate the computer was deliberate — the children did not speak English and had no access to formal education. They had never seen a computer before and hadn’t a clue what the internet was.
“I turned it on and left it there,” he said in a TED talk.
What he discovered was, without instruction, the children were capable of mastering the systems. And when they did, they began to teach one another. In a recent TED talk, Mitra shows video footage of an 8-year-old boy teaching a 6-year-old girl how to operate the computer.
“I noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do,” he said.
He began to implement similar programs throughout India, placing a computer in the middle of community centers and allowing children access throughout the day. Slowly, they began to learn the ins-and-outs of the machines. In one case, it took just four hours for students to learn how to use a recording device on the computer, which they used to record — and play back — one another’s voices.
According to Mitra, this is the way of the future in developing countries. Programs already exist in Columbia and South America, with plans to expand.
The professor plans on expanding his educational revolution through the creation of what he refers to as “cloud schools,” which allow students to develop on their own using a computer as their tool.
“In the first few weeks they will go berserk with games, then one child will discover Paint and the others will copy,” he told the BBC. “After four months they will discover Google.”
In February, Mitra was awarded with a $1 million grant to fulfill this dream. He’ll use the funds to take his model of learning to the next level, creating what he refers to as “schools in the cloud.”
“A school in the cloud is basically a school without physical teachers,” he said at the TEDGlobal talk while discussing what he’ll do with the money. “We need this because in many places you can’t get teachers or the teachers are very bad.”
And while the programs are intent on allowing students to go about the process on their own, he plans on expanding his “cloud granny” program, which now allows retired professionals to interact with Indian students through Skype. They don’t necessarily teach students, but they do engage.
Mitra’s method is unique in the sense that cloud grannies are essentially kept a secret from students — at first. Eventually, they’ll be warned that a giant screen in the classroom will be occupied by a British granny (or grandpa), but students will not know when, and will not likely understand.
“We will let 300 children in on the first day and all hell will break loose,” Mitra said. “But gradually they will start to organize themselves.”
Nanny Grannies
The Granny Cloud project, a program supported by Mitra’s School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, unites retired professionals in the U.K. to community organizations in India.
Last year, Mitra’s group of volunteer grannies reached 300.
In 2012, Jackie Barrow was profiled by the BBC as one of the retired professionals in the U.K. taking part in the program. Her story is like many other volunteers, who were intrigued by advertisements aimed at helping to teach children in India.
Barrow’s role is not to sit — virtually — in front of a classroom. Instead, she reads to the children and tells them stories about her life, often highlighting those stories with photos of her travels.
More than anything, these volunteers truly serve as grandparent figures for the children, a person who can see the improvements they’re making and can offer encouragement to those who often don’t receive it.
“We chat about my garden,” Barrow told the BBC. “In the spring I show them pictures of the lambs in the fields by the house and in the winter, pictures of the snow. If I go to London I take a picture of myself there. They love it.”
Mitra has admitted there have been some problems, particularly with cultural differences. Yet most volunteers recognize the culture gap and are sensitive to differences in religion.