Quotes from Sugata Mitra

I don't even want to guess at what computer literacy might do to children, except to say that if cyberspace is considered a place, then there are people who are already in it and people who are not in it.

It's quite fashionable to say that the educational system is broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore.

Too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.

I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web.

My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer.

Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.

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

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.

My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer.

In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.

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.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.

In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they're learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer.

Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.

You can force students to learn, to a certain extent, but students aren't happy and employers aren't happy.

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.

In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.

Knowing is NOT the most important thing. To be able to FIND OUT is more important than knowing.

It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.

If children have interest, then Education happens