Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitra
Sugata Mitrais Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at the for-profit training company NIIT. He won the TED Prize 2013...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth12 February 1952
CountryIndia
age dish information neither supposed teachers
Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers.
country teacher school
There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go.
teacher long google
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.
teacher children school
The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhaps, their schoolwork can suffer. They need to be taught to think and study for themselves.
teacher machines should
A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be.
teacher jobs giving
You don't actually need to know anything, you can find out at the point when you need to know it. It's the teachers job to point young minds towards the right kind of question, a teacher doesn't need to give any answers because answers are everywhere.
careers constantly exposed heroes pupils schools time tv
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.
education prepares
Education prepares to be one piece of a machine.
developing exist good places schools
There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.
clerks designed education empire exist produce schools
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.
alone children computer left nine office reach secretary standard
In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer - in any language - would reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.
entertainment
Entertainment can be a more powerful driver than poverty.
fear focused information innate quest
We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
children discovered information passing people
It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.