The many heresies of Dr Sugata Mitra

He used to sit next to me in school. Then he won a million dollars for a visionary idea. Now, he’s like a finger pointing at the moon—and everyone is discussing his finger

It’s probably a bit late to ask Mitra what he did with all the money he won from TED Talks in 2013. That was almost a decade ago. I was stunned to think that a boy who’d sat next to me through school had won a million dollars at 60. 

I believe it was the first time that TED had given that much money to anyone. But the point, really, is not how he won that jackpot but why.

Mitra’s “TED wish” was to build what he memorably called “schools in the cloud”. He believed that children left alone with a computer could teach themselves pretty much anything. Not that Mitra was particularly fond of children or even very good with them. I’m sure he’d not know which end of a baby was up if you’d handed him one. 

But he’s always been crazy about computers and what’s a child if not a supercomputer that’s yet to be hacked?

Mitra’s idea grew out of his so-called Hole-in-the-Wall experiments in the early 2000s. He told me one day in the dry, monotonal voice he uses when very excited, that he had embedded a PC, like an ATM, into the outer wall of his office facing a Kalkaji slum.

Soon, slum children were flocking there to poke and prod the shiny machine, unaware that Mitra’s hidden cameras and mics were recording everything. In a few weeks, the legend goes, they had figured out the computer and the Internet enough to start teaching themselves things.

After some more holes in some more walls, Mitra announced his concept of Minimally Invasive Education, stating that children left alone with a computer and a few big questions could teach themselves pretty much anything without supervision or formal education. Teachers, especially the kind that forced you to memorise things, were not really needed.

We don’t need no—ed-u-ca-tion. 

Mitra, definitely a child of the Pink Floyd generation, draws a line between education and learning. Teachers educate; children learn. One doesn’t lead to the other. But the future is in learning. In a digital age where all knowledge is just a few clicks away on your smartphone, yesterday’s teachers, textbooks and curricula don’t make sense.

At Newcastle University, where he worked till retirement as professor of educational technology, he noticed that children left alone to learn form self-organised learning systems—or SOLEs. Teachers could download DIY guides and try out the SOLE method in their classrooms.

Lots of people dismiss Mitra’s work and claims as pure bunkum. Since he’d never envisioned his experiments as seminal or foreseen their impact, his early methodology might have been patchy and flawed, without control groups or rigorous follow-up.

I began to pay closer attention when people started calling him “divisive”. When they start using that word, it usually means the person is on to something disruptive. 

Remember Galileo? He thought the earth was round. He wasn’t very popular.

It has taken a pandemic for people to realise that a classroom is not essential to learning. COVID-19 shut down schools, pushing learning online. Education became decentralised and apparently none the worse for it. Mitra is urgently warning people never to go back to that pre-COVID ‘normal’.

Enough teachers in enough countries have by now validated how his SOLE methodology has energised their classroom and re-kindled children’s creativity.

Countries like Norway and Sweden, with whom Mitra has worked, are dismantling entire educational curricula, questioning, for instance, why geography and history should be separate subjects when you can learn one through the other.

Unfortunately, Mitra has always been a storyteller and vulnerable to accusations of being a ‘showman’ who embellishes details.

He once described a 12-year-old non-English-speaking Tamil girl who, after months on one of Mitra’s roadside computers with a question about DNA, said, “We’ve understood nothing, sir. Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease.”

It’s a delightful story but children don’t speak like that and Mitra knows it. But his undoing is his fatal attraction to catchy punchlines.

More undoing happened when, towards the end of a BBC interview, he casually announced that “knowing was obsolete”. Another shitstorm ensued, but the truth is that he had once again said the quiet part out loud. The Internet has made it more important to know where to find information than to actually find it and ‘know’ it.

I find it easier to think of my school buddy as a visionary. Visionaries don’t have to be specific; they merely have to point. Arthur C Clarke, one of Mitra’s ruling deities, made several predictions, including that one day a surgeon in Edinburgh would operate on a patient in New Zealand, but might be hampered by network issues. Some called him a heretic.

Mitra’s latest heresy is that exams are meaningless because they ask you questions to which answers are known. A true exam should be based on questions that haven’t been answered yet. And you should be able to use Google to find the answers.

More Mitra heresies at  https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/sugata-mitra-schools-predictions-future-education

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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