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What is going to be the future of learning?

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I do have a plan,

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but in order for me to tell you what that plan is,

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I need to tell you a little story,

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which kind of sets the stage.

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I tried to look at

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where did the kind of learning we do in schools,

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where did it come from?

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And you can look far back into the past,

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but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is,

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it's quite easy to figure out where it came from.

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It came from about 300 years ago,

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and it came from the last

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and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"]

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Imagine trying to run the show,

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trying to run the entire planet,

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without computers, without telephones,

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with data handwritten on pieces of paper,

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and traveling by ships.

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But the Victorians actually did it.

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What they did was amazing.

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They created a global computer

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made up of people.

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It's still with us today.

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It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine.

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In order to have that machine running,

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you need lots and lots of people.

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They made another machine to produce those people:

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the school.

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The schools would produce the people

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who would then become parts of the

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bureaucratic administrative machine.

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They must be identical to each other.

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They must know three things:

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They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten;

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they must be able to read;

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and they must be able to do multiplication,

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division, addition and subtraction in their head.

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They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand

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and ship them to Canada

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and he would be instantly functional.

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The Victorians were great engineers.

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They engineered a system that was so robust

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that it's still with us today,

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continuously producing identical people

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for a machine that no longer exists.

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The empire is gone,

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so what are we doing with that design

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that produces these identical people,

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and what are we going to do next

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if we ever are going to do anything else with it?

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["Schools as we know them are obsolete"]

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So that's a pretty strong comment there.

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I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete.

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I'm not saying they're broken.

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It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken.

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It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed.

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It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.

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What are the kind of jobs that we have today?

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Well, the clerks are the computers.

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They're there in thousands in every office.

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And you have people who guide those computers

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to do their clerical jobs.

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Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand.

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They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads.

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They do need to be able to read.

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In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.

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Well, that's today, but we don't even know

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what the jobs of the future are going to look like.

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We know that people will work from wherever they want,

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whenever they want, in whatever way they want.

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How is present-day schooling going to prepare them

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for that world?

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Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident.

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I used to teach people how to write computer programs

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in New Delhi, 14 years ago.

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And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum.

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And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids

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ever going to learn to write computer programs?

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Or should they not?

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At the same time, we also had lots of parents,

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rich people, who had computers,

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and who used to tell me, "You know, my son,

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I think he's gifted,

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because he does wonderful things with computers.

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And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent."

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And so on. So I suddenly figured that,

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how come all the rich people are having

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these extraordinarily gifted children?

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(Laughter)

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What did the poor do wrong?

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I made a hole in the boundary wall

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of the slum next to my office,

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and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen

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if I gave a computer to children who never would have one,

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didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.

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The children came running in.

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It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?"

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And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know."

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(Laughter)

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They said, "Why have you put it there?"

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I said, "Just like that."

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And they said, "Can we touch it?"I said, "If you wish to."

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And I went away.

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About eight hours later,

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we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse.

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So I said, "Well that's impossible, because --

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How is it possible? They don't know anything."

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My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution.

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One of your students must have been passing by,

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showed them how to use the mouse."

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So I said, "Yeah, that's possible."

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So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi

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into a really remote village

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where the chances of a passing software development engineer

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was very little. (Laughter)

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I repeated the experiment there.

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There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in,

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I went away, came back after a couple of months,

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found kids playing games on it.

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When they saw me, they said,

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"We want a faster processor and a better mouse."

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(Laughter)

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So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?"

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And they said something very interesting to me.

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In an irritated voice, they said,

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"You've given us a machine that works only in English,

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so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter)

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That's the first time, as a teacher,

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that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually.

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Here's a short glimpse from those years.

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That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall.

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On your right is an eight-year-old.

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To his left is his student. She's six.

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And he's teaching her how to browse.

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Then onto other parts of the country,

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I repeated this over and over again,

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getting exactly the same results that we were.

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["Hole in the wall film - 1999"]

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An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do.

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And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is,

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and said, "There's a processor inside."

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So I started publishing.

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I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything,

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and I said, in nine months, a group of children

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left alone with a computer in any language

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will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.

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I'd seen it happen over and over and over again.

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But I was curious to know, what else would they do

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if they could do this much?

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I started experimenting with other subjects,

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among them, for example, pronunciation.

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There's one community of children in southern India

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whose English pronunciation is really bad,

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and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs.

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I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer,

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and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you say."

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(Laughter)

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They did that, and watch a little bit of this.

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Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you.

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Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face

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of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her.

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She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad

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and may have tortured you about your credit card bills

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in a very clear English accent.

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So then people said, well, how far will it go?

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Where does it stop?

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I decided I would destroy my own argument

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by creating an absurd proposition.

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I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis.

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Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said,

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can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village

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learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English

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from a streetside computer?

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And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero.

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I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months,

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I'll go back, they'll get another zero.

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I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers.

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I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India.

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I put in Hole in the Wall computers there,

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downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication,

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most of which I didn't understand.

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The children came rushing, said, "What's all this?"

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So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English."

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So they said, "How can we understand such big English words

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and diagrams and chemistry?"

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So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method,

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so I applied that. I said, "I haven't the foggiest idea."

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(Laughter)

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"And anyway, I am going away."

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(Laughter)

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So I left them for a couple of months.

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They'd got a zero. I gave them a test.

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I came back after two months

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and the children trooped in and said, "We've understood nothing."

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So I said, "Well, what did I expect?"

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So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you

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before you decided that you can't understand anything?"

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So they said, "We haven't given up.

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We look at it every single day."

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So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens

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and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?"

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So a little girl who you see just now,

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she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English,

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she said, "Well, apart from the fact that

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improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease,

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we haven't understood anything else."

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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So I tested them.

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I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent

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in two months in the tropical heat

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with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know

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doing something that's a decade ahead of their time.

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Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm.

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Thirty percent is a fail.

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How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks.

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I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had,

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a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant

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and she played with them all the time.

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So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?"

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So she says, "Absolutely not.

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I didn't have science in school. I have no idea

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what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you."

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I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother."

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So she says, "What's that?"

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I said, "Stand behind them.

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Whenever they do anything, you just say,

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'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that?

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What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.'

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You know what grannies do."

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So she did that for two more months.

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The scores jumped to 50 percent.

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Kallikuppam had caught up

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with my control school in New Delhi,

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a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher.

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When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.

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Here's Kallikuppam.

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(Children speaking) Neurons ... communication.

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I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff,

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but what she was saying, as you could make out,

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was about neurons, with her hands were like that,

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and she was saying neurons communicate.

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At 12.

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So what are jobs going to be like?

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Well, we know what they're like today.

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What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today,

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children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand

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and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand.

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What will it be tomorrow?

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Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all?

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Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something,

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you can find out in two minutes?

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Could it be -- a devastating question,

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a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte --

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could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in

256
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a future where knowing is obsolete?

257
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But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens.

258
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Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes.

259
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But look at it this way.

260
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It took nature 100 million years

261
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to make the ape stand up

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and become Homo sapiens.

263
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It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.

264
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What an achievement that is.

265
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But we have to integrate that into our own future.

266
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Encouragement seems to be the key.

267
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If you look at Kuppam,

268
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if you look at all of the experiments that I did,

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it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning.

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There is evidence from neuroscience.

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The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain,

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when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else,

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it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn,

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it shuts all of that down.

275
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Punishment and examinations are seen as threats.

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We take our children, we make them shut their brains down,

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and then we say, "Perform."

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Why did they create a system like that?

279
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Because it was needed.

280
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There was an age in the Age of Empires

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when you needed those people who can survive under threat.

282
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When you're standing in a trench all alone,

283
00:14:37,193 --> 00:14:41,224
if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed.

284
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If you didn't, you failed.

285
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But the Age of Empires is gone.

286
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What happens to creativity in our age?

287
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We need to shift that balance back

288
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from threat to pleasure.

289
00:14:56,915 --> 00:15:00,867
I came back to England looking for British grandmothers.

290
00:15:00,867 --> 00:15:03,884
I put out notices in papers saying,

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if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera,

292
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can you give me one hour of your time per week for free?

293
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I got 200 in the first two weeks.

294
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I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter)

295
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They're called the Granny Cloud.

296
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The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet.

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If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran.

298
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She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out.

299
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I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles

300
00:15:34,658 --> 00:15:36,703
in northwestern England,

301
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deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India,

302
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6,000 miles away.

303
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She does it with only one age-old gesture.

304
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"Shhh."

305
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Okay?

306
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Watch this.

307
00:15:51,799 --> 00:15:56,055
Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it.

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You can't catch me.

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Children: You can't catch me.

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Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man.

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Grandmother: Well done! Very good.

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SM: So what's happening here?

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I think what we need to look at is

314
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we need to look at learning

315
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as the product of educational self-organization.

316
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If you allow the educational process to self-organize,

317
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then learning emerges.

318
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It's not about making learning happen.

319
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It's about letting it happen.

320
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The teacher sets the process in motion

321
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and then she stands back in awe

322
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and watches as learning happens.

323
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I think that's what all this is pointing at.

324
00:16:45,492 --> 00:16:48,244
But how will we know? How will we come to know?

325
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Well, I intend to build

326
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these Self-Organized Learning Environments.

327
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They are basically broadband, collaboration

328
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and encouragement put together.

329
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I've tried this in many, many schools.

330
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It's been tried all over the world, and teachers

331
00:17:03,539 --> 00:17:07,165
sort of stand back and say, "It just happens by itself?"

332
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And I said, "Yeah, it happens by itself.""How did you know that?"

333
00:17:10,282 --> 00:17:13,775
I said, "You won't believe the children who told me

334
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and where they're from."

335
00:17:16,703 --> 00:17:19,447
Here's a SOLE in action.

336
00:17:19,447 --> 00:17:25,556
(Children talking)

337
00:17:25,556 --> 00:17:31,845
This one is in England.

338
00:17:31,845 --> 00:17:35,611
He maintains law and order,

339
00:17:35,611 --> 00:17:44,126
because remember, there's no teacher around.

340
00:17:46,096 --> 00:17:49,999
Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons -- SM: Australia

341
00:17:49,999 --> 00:17:56,734
Girl: -- giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge.

342
00:17:56,734 --> 00:18:00,318
The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons

343
00:18:00,318 --> 00:18:03,611
in the ion minus the number of electrons.

344
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SM: A decade ahead of her time.

345
00:18:06,660 --> 00:18:10,263
So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions.

346
00:18:10,263 --> 00:18:12,469
You already heard about that. You know what that means.

347
00:18:12,469 --> 00:18:15,870
There was a time when Stone Age men and women

348
00:18:15,870 --> 00:18:17,974
used to sit and look up at the sky and say,

349
00:18:17,974 --> 00:18:20,453
"What are those twinkling lights?"

350
00:18:20,453 --> 00:18:25,247
They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions.

351
00:18:25,247 --> 00:18:29,377
We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle.

352
00:18:29,377 --> 00:18:33,085
But that's not sexy enough.

353
00:18:33,085 --> 00:18:36,046
The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say,

354
00:18:36,046 --> 00:18:39,199
"If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth,

355
00:18:39,199 --> 00:18:42,597
how would you figure out if it was going to or not?"

356
00:18:42,597 --> 00:18:45,157
And if he says, "Well, what? how?"

357
00:18:45,157 --> 00:18:48,142
you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle,"

358
00:18:48,142 --> 00:18:51,013
and leave him alone. He'll figure it out.

359
00:18:51,013 --> 00:18:55,471
So here are a couple of images from SOLEs.

360
00:18:55,471 --> 00:19:01,060
I've tried incredible, incredible questions --

361
00:19:01,060 --> 00:19:05,348
"When did the world begin? How will it end?" —

362
00:19:05,348 --> 00:19:07,293
to nine-year-olds.

363
00:19:07,293 --> 00:19:10,269
This one is about what happens to the air we breathe.

364
00:19:10,269 --> 00:19:15,227
This is done by children without the help of any teacher.

365
00:19:15,227 --> 00:19:17,611
The teacher only raises the question,

366
00:19:17,611 --> 00:19:21,275
and then stands back and admires the answer.

367
00:19:21,275 --> 00:19:25,011
So what's my wish?

368
00:19:25,011 --> 00:19:27,227
My wish is

369
00:19:27,227 --> 00:19:31,541
that we design the future of learning.

370
00:19:31,541 --> 00:19:33,507
We don't want to be spare parts

371
00:19:33,507 --> 00:19:35,899
for a great human computer, do we?

372
00:19:35,899 --> 00:19:39,555
So we need to design a future for learning.

373
00:19:39,555 --> 00:19:41,191
And I've got to -- hang on,

374
00:19:41,191 --> 00:19:43,891
I've got to get this wording exactly right,

375
00:19:43,891 --> 00:19:46,535
because, you know, it's very important.

376
00:19:46,535 --> 00:19:48,851
My wish is to help design a future of learning

377
00:19:48,851 --> 00:19:51,085
by supporting children all over the world

378
00:19:51,085 --> 00:19:54,131
to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together.

379
00:19:54,131 --> 00:19:56,363
Help me build this school.

380
00:19:56,363 --> 00:19:59,699
It will be called the School in the Cloud.

381
00:19:59,699 --> 00:20:04,772
It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures

382
00:20:04,772 --> 00:20:08,629
driven by the big questions which their mediators put in.

383
00:20:08,629 --> 00:20:10,900
The way I want to do this

384
00:20:10,900 --> 00:20:15,260
is to build a facility where I can study this.

385
00:20:15,260 --> 00:20:18,060
It's a facility which is practically unmanned.

386
00:20:18,060 --> 00:20:19,827
There's only one granny

387
00:20:19,827 --> 00:20:22,268
who manages health and safety.

388
00:20:22,268 --> 00:20:23,701
The rest of it's from the cloud.

389
00:20:23,701 --> 00:20:25,616
The lights are turned on and off by the cloud,

390
00:20:25,616 --> 00:20:27,644
etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud.

391
00:20:27,644 --> 00:20:30,869
But I want you for another purpose.

392
00:20:30,869 --> 00:20:33,628
You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments

393
00:20:33,628 --> 00:20:38,644
at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs.

394
00:20:38,644 --> 00:20:40,772
It's very easy to do. There's a great document

395
00:20:40,772 --> 00:20:42,660
produced by TED which tells you how to do it.

396
00:20:42,660 --> 00:20:46,036
If you would please, please do it

397
00:20:46,036 --> 00:20:48,401
across all five continents

398
00:20:48,401 --> 00:20:50,612
and send me the data,

399
00:20:50,612 --> 00:20:54,116
then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds,

400
00:20:54,116 --> 00:20:57,380
and create the future of learning.

401
00:20:57,380 --> 00:20:59,172
That's my wish.

402
00:20:59,172 --> 00:21:00,595
And just one last thing.

403
00:21:00,595 --> 00:21:03,188
I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas.

404
00:21:03,188 --> 00:21:06,491
At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin,

405
00:21:06,491 --> 00:21:09,476
I once built two Hole in the Wall computers,

406
00:21:09,476 --> 00:21:10,931
and the children flocked there.

407
00:21:10,931 --> 00:21:13,828
And there was this little girl who was following me around.

408
00:21:13,828 --> 00:21:18,544
And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child.

409
00:21:18,544 --> 00:21:20,945
I don't know, what should I do?"

410
00:21:20,945 --> 00:21:24,976
And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly.

411
00:21:24,976 --> 00:21:29,032
She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me,

412
00:21:29,032 --> 00:21:30,921
"Get on with it."

413
00:21:30,921 --> 00:21:42,785
(Laughter) (Applause)

414
00:21:42,785 --> 00:21:44,646
I think it was good advice.

415
00:21:44,646 --> 00:21:46,714
I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking.

416
00:21:46,714 --> 00:21:50,704
Thank you. Thank you very much.

417
00:21:50,704 --> 00:21:54,455
(Applause)

418
00:21:54,455 --> 00:22:02,779
Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

419
00:22:02,779 --> 00:22:09,194
Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause)