Schools need to have the Self Organised Learning Environments, avers Sugata Mitra
People don’t read as many books and articles as they used to. This could be due to various reasons. We live immersed in the Internet where information in small packets is available instantly through our phones and we talk, type, listen and read all the time. We look things up and are in constant touch with our friends, exchanging information, trivial or otherwise, sometimes deep into the night. Our attention spans are shorter than before the Internet age. We can, at best, focus on a 40-minute episode in a serial (a video story told in small chunks), but only if our interest in the content remains high. We cannot read for 40 minutes at a stretch – our minds wander to the myriad thoughts raining down on us from the Cloud through our devices. We’ve evolved.
If you think you do not fall in the above mentioned category, you are a minority. Billions of youngsters wandering around the developing and developed worlds are more educated, their knowledge is not segmented by curriculum, their pedagogy is self-organised and their assessment is by their peers. They are often unemployed or, at best, reluctantly employed. He drives while talking to his device; she combs her hair and looks at her phone at the same time. What kind of dog is that? You ask the dog walker. He points his phone’s camera at the dog and says it’s a Labrador. He does not quite know how to pronounce the word.
Vast, disjointed shards of knowledge occupy his brain, orders of magnitude more than his previous generation – his parents, his grandparents. She doesn’t understand multiplication but can work out the discount on a new cream that reduces arthritis pain that she wants to get for her mother. It takes more time than she thought because she is distracted by the news that a spacecraft has landed upside down on the far side of the Moon. She laughs.
As a teacher, principal, owner or correspondent of a school, you want to inculcate discipline, values and empathy and good manners, you want your school to be the best.
The purpose of education is to enable people to live happy, healthy, and useful lives. Most governments don’t pay much attention to the happy and healthy bits in schools, the focus is on useful. Not only that, the curriculum of useful things that every child should know is a list that would make sense in Victorian England, it is about two hundred years out of date. For example, finding the square root of a number by hand, memorising times tables, having good, scripted handwriting, memorising the dates of the Sepoy Mutiny or the Battle of Plessey. The result: unhappy people.
Any child with a smart phone can be useful. They don’t, necessarily, need to know things inside their heads. Instead, they need to know how to look things up, figure things out and tell other people what they are up to. In formal language these are called Computing, Comprehension and Communication. Schools need to assess Computing, Comprehension and Communication skills, not memory.
After the industrial revolution, schools included engines, thermodynamics, electricity, gravitation and so on into their curricula because they knew people would be surrounded by science and technology all their lives. Any child today will live with the Internet, Artificial Intelligence and associated technology for the rest of their lives. The Internet needs to be a subject in schools like Physics, Chemistry etc. This is obvious. Most people know how steam engines work but they have no idea about how the Internet works. If the Internet is made into a subject in schools, it cannot be “taught” because it changes all the time, there can never be an UpToDate textbook, and a school teacher who understands Internet technology well would be working for the tech industry. So, “The Internet” cannot be taught, but it can be learned. Through self-organized learning and assessment methods, the Internet can be learned using the Internet.
Generative AI has been around for public use since 2022. These “things” can converse like human beings. They “know” just about everything there is to know, in every language. They can teach, lecture, examine and advise. We are afraid of them. Our children will not be. They will treat GenAI like friends and mentors. There are many predictions, mostly dire, about what GenAI can and will do. Most of these pronouncements are not based on any understanding of how GenAI works. Teachers need to understand the inner workings and design of GenAI and then integrate them into teaching and learning. A teacher who knows how steam engines work but does not know how the Internet or GenAI works is out of date and, I am afraid, unfit for purpose.
Groups of children, clustered around the Internet in safe, publicly visible spaces, can learn anything by themselves. Such spaces are called “Self Organised Learning Environments” or SOLEs. Schools need to have the SOLE pedagogy integrated into their fabric. Schools need to be immersed in The Cloud. They need spaces where children can make things. “Maker Spaces” or “FabLabs”. Children need spaces to play and, mercifully, these are mostly there in all schools. And, of course, children need teachers who talk to them, like they have done since education began.
Make that kind of school.
(Sugata Mitra retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology, Newcastle University, England after 13 years there including a year as Visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab in the USA. He is known for his experiments “The Hole In The Wall” and “Self Organised Learning Environments”. Amongst his many awards from around the world is the million dollar TED Prize in 2013. He currently directs the “Tataha Kim Laboratory”, his virtual working space.)
