Quotes from Sugata Mitra

I'm encouraging kids to use computers at their own pace to build aspirations.

Let children wander aimlessly around ideas.

Who knows what we'll need to learn thirty years from now? We do know that we will need to be good at searching for information, collating it, and figuring out whether it is right or wrong.

Learning is the new skill. Imagination, creation and asking new questions are at its core.

My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.

Entertainment can be a more powerful driver than poverty.

I don't mind children cribbing answers off other children. It's one of the ways they can learn. I also don't think there should be too many constraints on what they can look at on the Internet.

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It's not about making learning happen; it's about letting it happen.

The bottom line is, if you're not the one controlling your learning, you're not going to learn as well.

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

People are adamant learning is not just looking at a Google page. But it is. Learning is looking at Google pages. What is wrong with that?

Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning.

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.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

Education prepares to be one piece of a machine.

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.

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.

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.

Go to a job interview and tell and employer that you can recite the 17 times table; they don't care. Why are we still teaching it?

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.

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.

A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be.

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.

We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.