Chris Roe: Well, Im really pleased to be able to welcome our next speaker. He is an amazing person. If you havent heard about him before, you are in for a real treat. Doctor Sugata Mitra is professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK and a visiting professor at MIT, right here in the United States. He works in the area of cognitive science, informational science and education technology. Sugata has been working in these areas, as well as in Physics and Energy for more than 30 years and holds a PhD in theoretical solid state physics. His contributions included number of inventions and first time applications. And in 1999, Sugata conducted a now-world-famous experiment in which he dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an internet-connected PC and left it there with a hidden camera filming the area. The surprising results have challenged some of our key assumptions about formal education and I believe he is going to talk more about this during his speech this morning which will be quite interesting. The global consequences of Sugatas discovery for closing the digital divide have resulted in many international awards and even inspired a book Slumdog Millionaire that went on to become the Oscar-winning movie in 2009. We are honored to have Sugata here today to talk about his inspiring journey and discoveries on how we can learn from them as we transform our own education system here in California. And he is also going to do a workshop after this as well. So for those of you who are looking to go to a workshop, you might want to consider that as well. So, I am very pleased to welcome to the stage, Doctor Sugata Mitra. (Audience claps). Sugata Mitra: Thank you. Good morning. It is going to be a bit of a challenge if you want to have your coffee on time. (Audience laughs). Well first of all, I must tell you that I have no formal education, no formal knowledge of Education. I never studied it as a subject. My subject was actually Physics and I kind of reluctantly got into Education. My father was an educationist and he used to work for a place called The National Council of Education in Delhi. And when I was about 3 years old, I remember he had an American visitor and I sat on his lap for quite a while and he keep tickling my, you know, bellybutton and things like that. (Audience laughs). It was several decades later that I came to know who that man was. His name was B.F. Skinner (audience laughs). So that was the only introduction I have had to formal education (audience laughs). So how did I get into all this? Well, I am only trying-- to tell you the story very quickly, but before I do that, I was very struck by the previous two messages that we heard, particularly that number that 11% are unemployed but there are more than one job per head. So why are not the 11% going for that one per head? I think I have a vague notion of why that might be. The other thing I wanted to tell you before I start, is we heard the story of the endeavor, of course, it is all that magnificent, I mean, it is going through almost creating the buildings on the other side, a symbol of achievement. But just before I came, a day before yesterday on the British Television, I saw a little news item, to know what these are about. Somebody had done a study on pigeons, on homing pigeons. And for some strange reason, last year, 25% of homing pigeons never made it back. You know I thought-- I mean, I got a shiver up my spine when I heard that. What is it? Is it the geomagnetic fields change? Is the sun changing? So when you talk about STEM, yes of course it is about achievement but also is about bringing the pigeons home. (Audience claps). So lets-- if you have to look at the far future, we better look at the far past as well. So where did all of these come from? Our good old schooling system, you know, which hasnt seem todoesnt seem to change for, I dont know, Millennia (Audience and speaker laughs). It is there. Historically, you can see it back, you know, in the ruins of 5000 B.C. buildings, you see school rooms. So, we dont know. I couldnt find out where it had actually come from originally. But I know where the kind of system we are in right now, where that came from, that is pretty obvious. It came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. So lot of these guys trying to run the whole world from a tiny little island (audience and speaker laughs). Okay, what did they need? They needed thousands of administrators (audience laughs). They needed millions of clocks, millions of soldiers, etcetera. I mean, I would hate to be in that position of suddenly being told, We need 700 clocks in Ghana. You know something like that. And so-- So but the Victorians are good engineers; so they engineered a system which was so robust that it remains until today, the Victorian system. Okay? But we must remember what it was for, it was for running an empire. It does not exist anymore. What were its main products produced out of these Victorian schools? The clocks. They were identical to each other. And I am afraid if you look around the room, particularly at the men, you will see them including myself (audience laughs) because we are dressed the same way. We have behavioral norms which I found 200 years ago (audience and speaker laughs). We know the multiplication tables by heart (audience laughs). More identical people, so identical that the clothes that they wear are called uniform. When the empires ended, they action moved to the United States, with the industrial revolution, the captains of industry have kind of look at this system and said, This is fantastic. We can produce identical consumers buying identical things produced by identical people. (audience laughs) And they did it. So the system persisted. But when I was going through this and I was wondering what about the young people themselves? What did- did not they kind of find this a little stifling? And I found that they indeed did; twice in history in fairly innovative ways. These young people try to say, We do not want to be identical. The first time Bengal in the 19th century in the middle of the Victorian education system, one lad went out on the street with musical instruments, long haired, dope-smoking and said We will do what we like, we will dress as we like. and they called themselves approximately translated, Free as the wind. The empire crushed them. (Audience laughs). A hundred years later, in the 1960s, the same thing out of this country, the United States, okay? A whole lot of children walking out of the universities on to the streets saying We dont know we have flowers in our hair, well grow our hair, women will wear trousers. They said. And so this time, the industry finished them off (audience laughs). So, here we are today. Are they going to say we dont want to be identical? You bet. And how are they going to say it? There are different ways of saying it now. They will sit at the back of the class and yawn. Okay. So Disengagement we call it, I say descent. What they are trying to say is We do not know what this is for. So you just have to tell us what its for. If they find it interesting, they will do it. Well, beginnings of the crack in the system a couple of weeks ago, the newspaper headlines said 150 Harvard undergraduates caught cheating. When I read that, I said Harvard undergraduates, these are the best students in the world. I mean, why on earth would they be cheating? We have to investigate the word cheating. I put that up on my Facebook page (audience laughs), the very next morning, the student union put this one out in the newspapers they said, We didnt know that we were cheating because the assignment said collaboration is allowed and yet assignment said using internet resources is allowed. We collaborated with text and we collaborated on the internet. One of us wrote the assignment. He posted it on his website. When you post it on your website, it becomes an internet resource, we downloaded it. (Audience laughs) Okay. You might laugh but this is the voice of descent and its the kind of descent that we havent heard of it before because we didnt never-- there never was a word like this ever before. We have to tackle that before we can get them back into classroom doing what we want them to do. And what is it that we want them to do anyway? A child born today is going to live for a 120 years at a conservative estimate. And we are going to prepare them for that, right? Who are the childs customers? Well his parents first of all. What do the parents want? At age 19, nicely dressed, hair combed properly with a degree and a cap at the commencement ceremony, we call it Convocation or something like that. There is another customer, the government. Does the government want exactly what the parents want? Not quite, there are a little bits of differences there. That is the whole business of obedience, conformance, etcetera. Then there is a third customer, the potential employer. What does he want? Does he want what the government wants or what the parents want? Well, some of it but he also wants something else. He wants aggressive entrepreneurship, industrial creativity, the seeking of profit, etcetera. So we have these three overlapping boxes but they are not quite the same. And there is a fourth customer, the peers. What do the peers want? Bubble spiky hair (audience laughs). They do not figure enough planning in our equation at all. But 120 years, the parents are going to be dead in 20. The government is going to change at least 40 times in their period. The employers, they will close their shops, new employers will come, God knows what kind of employment do they have to offer. All of those customers will have gone. That child is going to live with the fourth customer, the peer for whom we planned nothing. So schooling, as we know it, is obsolete. We do not have to discuss already if it is good or bad. It is obsolete, things go obsolete. This is one of those things that have gone obsolete. It is outdated, you got to change it. But what is the keyword, what is the key thing for our world. Well I thought of an example. Some of you in this room, increasingly fewer in number, will remember a gadget, a device called The radiogram. The radiogram was a large piece of furniture. It had a record player on one side, a radio on the other. The radio used to take about three minutes to warm up (audience laughs) and had glow like an electric heater and then play. My mother had one and she was very proud of it and that it was at the center of the living room. S he used to call our neighbors and say she has a new radiogram and you, of course, do not have one that sort of thing you know (audience laughs). And so, then the tape recorder came and the tape recorder was like 40 pounds in weight and my fathers generation said Wow, it is portable (audience laughs). We can actually take it from the living room to the bedroom, the radiogram. Then Sony went and invented the Walkman and I remember my father telling me, Why on earth would anybody want to carry the radiogram in his pocket. You know and so. (Audience laughs). The Walkman came and went into the tiniest of the lot, the MP3 player. Now it was the size of posted stamp. It cost nothing. I t contained all the music you had. It was so small and so cheap that you could now say, I had lost my radiogram, it fell out of my pocket. You know. (Audience laughs). But what happened next to the radiogram is utterly incredible, the MP3 player vanished. It became a cloud of ones and zeros and went up into the internet. I f you had anything with which you could access the internet, all your music was there. It is one of those cases which you use to read about in fairytales, of things vanishing, it is happening. That is our age, the dematerialization of banks, the dematerialization of money, the dematerialization of the share market. What about our institutions? So I do not have that lecture ready yet but there will be one called (audience laughs) Dematerialization. (Audience laughs). You know I could just go out right now into San Diego and rent myself a room, write down and put a board over there saying Sugata Mitra accountant. And I have under my table, a little screen with Google on it. I have asked one of these Silicon Valley geeks to invent a keyboard which is not physical so that I can type in Mitish actually like this and I opened my shop. And in, comes the first customer and says I have a problem with my balance sheet. And so I say, A problem with what? And he says Balance sheet. Aha! You have a problem with your balance sheet, did you bring up a hard copy of it. Just leave it here and I will-- lets see what I can do. He goes out, I get unto the Newsgroups, I get unto what is-- I get unto Google, I get unto Wikipedia. I find the accountants on Skype, by tomorrow I have got his problem sorted out. So he comes back and he says, Sugata Mitra, that accountant is a funny kind of guy you know. Whenever you talk to him, hes really slow. He kind of looks down like this and keeps twiddling his fingers (audience laughs). So I pretend to be an accountant. I get it before a year. At the end of the year, now people are saying, Sugata Mitra, he does not charge too much, hes okay actually, hes not too bad. Why do they say that? The first day I Googled balance sheet, but the second day I dont because I Googled it yesterday. So I pretended for a year. Then I went on, I go on pretending. After three years, the newspapers in San Diego reports Sugata Mitra, the famous accountant is going to deliver a keynote address. (audience laughs) So is it pretense? Could it be that education is a process of becoming what you pretend? And I think if you look back at all your careers, the day you came out of college with your Bachelor of Education degree, you know or I am now licensed to practice Engineering or whatever, were you not pretending? And is it not true that 20 years later you can look back and say I know what Engineering really means. Okay, so if there is a grand means to pretend, should we not adopt it? Well, this is a 13-year-old story and many people have heard it but it is about children and dematerialization. These kids that I was dealing with in those days, I used to work for a big company. And outside, the street kids in New Delhi, they did not have schools. So I said, Well if I they cannot have schools and they have the cloud. And I stuck computers into walls just to see what children would do. And people said but they dont know English, they do not understand, they have never seen a computer 13 years ago, what do you expect that they will do? And I said, I dont know. So I put this computer in a wall, three feet off the ground. And all the kids came rushing in and they say, What is this? So I said, I dont know. So they said, Whos it for? I said, I dont know. (Audience laughs). What are we supposed to do with it? I said, I dont know. And I left them to with it and it is a story told many times but eight hours later they were surfing and teaching each other how to surf. So then people said, Oh it is very simple. You know, one of his students I used to teach expensive courses for children to learn computer programming. One of his students were passing by and showed them how to browse. So what is so great about this? So I repeated the experiment 300 miles away in the middle of nowhere, in rural India and left the computer there and stuck in the wall for three months. And I came back, I found children playing games on it. And when they saw me, they said, We need a faster processor and a better mouse (audience laughs). So I said, What do you mean? I mean, how do you know all this? So they said something which is I think extremely important for all educators to listen to. They said, You have left here a machine which works only in English, so we taught ourselves English in order to use it. Okay, so the words kind of stuck in my mind, they just taught themselves. I started to get funding. The World Bank had noticed and they said, Well find out if this is just accidental or will it happen everywhere. And to cut the long story short, 8-to-12 year olds can teach themselves how to use a computer and the internet anywhere in the world no matter who they are, no matter what language they speak, no matter what the, you know, monitor the situation is irrespective of anything. So heres a quick glance at those years. This is the first day at the what the press called The Hole in the Wall. This 8-year-old on the right teaching his student who is 6, how to browse. Then I repeated this over and over again. This is... (Video playing in foreign language). So what did we get? This is all published. I was measuring all along. In 9 months, groups of children given unsupervised access to computers in a public space will teach themselves to use the computer and reach a proficiency level of the average office secretary in the West. So when that got published, then everybody said, Whats going on, what does this mean to education and training? But I was curious over something else, that if they can teach themselves how to use a computer, what else could they teach themselves? So I started to do a whole series of experiments. I do not have the time but they were pretty carefully-designed experiments on Physics, on pronunciation, on English and Algebra. The basic approach each time was this stuff is really very cool but I do not have the time to teach you anything about it. That is it, okay and each time I showed improvement in scores. So what was going on? Power, the children had power and we did not realize it. So I came to this conclusion that groups of children using the internet can achieve educational objectives on their own. Now school teachers who were, up until then quite good friends of mine, (audience laughs) they tend to become a little quieter. (Giggles). But there was another question that okay, this hole-in-the-wall computers that you stuck on the wall, theyve been hanging around there for years now, what have they done to the society that they were in? I had no answer but I was lucky. A film maker, a documentary film maker was driving up the west and coast of India when she saw a village, the dirty stretch of wall, two computers sticking out of it and children. And she stopped. She got down from the car and went up to the children and said, What is this? and the children said, This is a childs computer, it is not for you. (Audience laughs). And so she said, Okay, okay, Im not coming anywhere near but whats itI mean whohow did you get this? And they said, Well you know years ago there was a man from Delhi, he came and stuck these in the wall and he never came back. (Audience laughs). So she decided to stay on and follow through. And she made a documentary and have made a 6-minute extract out of it. You must see that because it talks about the story of one child and a remarkable school teacher in rural India. (Video playing in foreign language). You may have to read the subtitles. Hes talking about his village. (Video continues to play in foreign language). So two computers stuck into a wall. So I-- going back, my background in Physics, I could not but believe that when you have a small input producing a disproportionately large output then what you are looking at is what in Physics we call as Self-organizing system. It is only there that these things happen. So you have, you know, bits of air and dust and you got little dust devils moving up and down, running about the place, disappearing and then one of them starts to grow and then suddenly, there is a monster. Thats a self-organizing system, it shows emergent behavior. Anyway, at that time, back in Newcastle people were asking me, How far can all these go? I am mean, you are just saying Give them the computer, go away, you know, how far does it go? So I decided to design an experiment, a social science experiment. Can Tamil-speaking children from a village in India teach themselves the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer on their own? (Audience laughs). I thought every social scientist should be proud of a research question like that. (Audience laughs). Give them a pretest, theyll get a zero. (Audience laughs). Give them a post-test, theyll get another zero. I go back to Newcastle and say we need teachers. S o I found a village, I put in the computers. They already had hole-in-the-wall computers. T hey were pretty good with the computers playing games. I downloaded straightforward DNA replication genetics material from the internet into those computers. I called some children. They anyway came running. I said look, this stuff is very interesting but it is all in English. So they immediately ran, theyre all 12-year-old, started looking at everything. And they said, But how can we understand, this have got big English words, it has got you know Chemistry things and diagrams, how can we possibly understand. So I said, I have no idea. And anyway, theres no place in your village for me to stay, Im going away (audience laughs). So one day I came back after 2 months, they had trooped in looking very quiet. So I ask them, What happened? S they said, We have understood nothing. So what do they expect? So then I said, When did you give up? So they said, Give up? Of course we havent given up. We look at it every single day. So I said, You do not understand the word of it and you look at it every single day, what for? So then one little girl raised her hand and said in broken Tamil and English, I remember it perfectly. She said, Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we have understood nothing else. (Audience laughs). So that is a generation that is growing up on the cloud who set bars for themselves that has so way up more that where we set our bars, that we cannot even conceive of what it means when they say, We havent understood anything. So I measured it and I call it educational impossibility, 0% to 30% in 2 months standing in the tropical heat and, you know, on roadside computers learning DNA. But I could not go back to Newcastle with this because 30% in the Victorian system is a fail. I had to get them 20 more. Where am I going to get 20 more marks in the middle of nowhere? So I found a young girl, an accountant who played with these children; they were good friends. She was about 22 years old. I asked her to help. So she said, I cannot help you because I did not have any science in school, I do not understand what these kids do all day long on those computers (audience laughs), you know, I cant help you. I said, Okay, use the method of the grandmother. So she said, What is that? It is just you stand behind them, whenever they do anything, say Wow fantastic! (Audience laughs) And soI say you know, how do you do it, can you do a little more of that? When I was your age, I could not have ever done it. She did a perfect job of that. In two more months, 50% same as my control school in New Delhi with a trained teacher. So I went back to Newcastle looking for grandmothers. (Audience laughs). I have-- I put an appeals in papers saying, If you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per week for free? I got 200. In the university, they are called the Granny Cloud. The Granny Cloud sits on the internet that each one with 30, 40 years of primary, elementary school education experience. The Granny Cloud sits up there on the internet wherever in the world that a school is in trouble, you beam a grand over Skype. And she appears on the wall and she generally says Shhh and 5000 miles away, you will find the kid quietened down. (Audience laughs). So I have decided that I would have to do this in England because by then I decided-- I have also figured out one more thing which I must tell you although I do not know how you will react to it. We divided the world up into two sections, developing countries and developed countries. Could I change the definition with just a little semantic change to developing countries and countries that have stopped developing. Now you do not want that, do you? So I do not understand the meaning. Every country has to be a developing country for heavens sake, how can you say developed, developed, that is it, end of development. So what happens if you say that you have developed and keep doing the same thing over and over again, you got a STEM problem. That is what happens. So, so I decided I would bring the hole in the wall into England but in England you cannot do anything outdoors because of the weather. So, so I decided I would bring the hole in the wall into the classroom. It is very easy to do, you just rearrange the furniture, you close down all the computers except one for every 4 or 5 children. And then so the children say, Why are you closing[closing all these computers down? I said, Because you know if I give you all the computer, you are not going to talk. But now you have to talk and you have to share those one little screen just like they had too in India and Africa and they said so show them films, and then Oh wow! So and then, you leave them with a question. The question had to be very good. I f it is, you will see learning happen like a tornado out of the sand. So the BBC made a film and-- can I take 5 minutes of your coffee? Video: Val Almonds and Debbie Mann are the vanguard of a revolutionary new approach to global education. Once a week they log on to their computers to talk to, read and play games with groups of children from remote parts of India. Debbie Mann: Hello. Hi. My name is Debbie and I live in Loughborough, which is in the middle of England. Can you see this picture? Audience: Yes. Debbie Mann: What is it? Audience: Its [0:35:49.2] Video: This cross-cultural education project is the brainchild of Professor Sugata Mitra who, originally from India himself, took on a post at the University of Newcastle four years ago. Interviewer: What is the problem of the heart of what you are trying to address? Sugata Mitra: You can have places where you cannot build a school. Such places exist in the world. And even more commonly, you can have places where you have schools but good teachers do not want to or cannot go. So what do we do about that then? Because there are children everywhere and that is what I am trying to address. Interviewer: Let us talk about how this started. Sugata Mitra: Well that was 12 years ago and at that time, I was working in Delhi and I was training people to learn how to program computers. And only the rich children got the opportunity to join these expensive training programs. The poor children did not, but there was nothing to prevent the poor children from having the abilities to be an excellent programmers. So I thought to myself of what would happen if I put a computer like an ATM in a wall in a slum. Video: What Sugata observed was that children would flock to these hole-in-the-wall computers and without any knowledge of IT, and little or no English, teach themselves how to use them. Sugata Mitra: And when I asked them, they said, Well if you have given us a computer which works in English, then we have to teach ourselves English in order to use it. It sounds very simple but that is what they were doing. The lesson from that first five years of experiments is that groups of children given access to a computer in an unsupervised environment will be capable of self-instructing them to use it. Video: Sugata then took his experiment a step further to see if he could deepen the childrens learning experience. Sugata Mitra: I ask a friendly girl in the neighborhood who they, you know, sort of played with. I asked her to pretend or to use what I now describe as The method of the grandmother which is, that you stand behind the children and you admire them. Every time they do something, you say Well, I could not have done that. My God, when I was a kid, I would have never been able to find this. The children love that obviously and they want to show off to that figure. So when I came back to Britain, I started recruitment drive so to speak for grandmothers who have broadband and were willing to give me one hour of their time every week for free. Video: Excellent, again. Sugata Mitra: What is their job? Their job is to provide that additional 20% boost to the children by admiring them. Video: Excellent, give yourselves clap. (Clapping). Sugata Mitra: That Is what I am trying to achieve in India using the British Granny Cloud as it is called. Video: And there are now about 200 people from all over the UK in the Granny Cloud. You do not actually have to be a granny to take part though. Video2: Grisly, fantastic well done. Video3: Can you tell me what this is I am wearing and who would wear it (laughter)? Audience from video: The queen. Video3: The queen? Absolutely. Video4: Hello, Im Tim. Audience: How are you? Video4: Im alright. Video5: Have you heard of the football called Wayne Rooney? Audience from video: Yes. Video5: What sort of bear does Wayne Rooney look like? Audience from video: A Teddy bear. Video5: A teddy bear. (Laughter). Video6: So many children in the world do not have access to education because of the remote area they live in, they are poor, whatever. Video7: Can you see how the leaves have dropped from the trees? That is very near to where I live. Video6: But through technology, you can get through to the poorest of children. Video: And Sugatas new teaching methods have now also arrived on these shores. The Westerns learn from these very first experiments in India with hole-in-the-wall computers, now being applied to schools in [Gate set. Video8: Are you Steven? Audience from video: Bonjour. Video8: Bonjour, good. Sugata Mitra: So the process is that you take a group of children. You ask them to make groups of four. Each group of four is allowed to use one computer with an internet connection, and then you trigger off the system with a question. That question is absolutely critical. Video8: What I want you to find out for me to do is where does language come from? What? I dont know the answer. Video9: When are you going to start looking? Audience on video: (Cross talking) See that language is the very thing that makes a female. Where did language come from? Video9: Wiki answers. Would not be easy for teacher to just tell you where language came from? Audience on video: No, because maybe we learn many things from ourselves. Audience2 on video: Like when you got a hard question and it is like you find out what makes it feel in much order. Video9: Do you, so you feel about 9 and a half. Audience2: Yes. Sugata Mitra (video): I had my doubts about, you know, is this really learning. It is efficient. The children enjoy it. The right answer always comes back, but is it really learning. Thats a lot of stuff I had. I would not have been able to get this much in such a short time, really? So I waited for 2 or 3 months, I went back to the children, I ask them the same question. This time saying, You cannot discuss with anybody, you have to answer it to yourself. And noticed very quickly that they were answering, that everybody was answering it correctly. And they were answering it with something keen to photographic recall. So I would tend to believe that what we are seeing here is deep learning happening through a mechanism which is very different from the existing model of how we educate. Sugata Mitra: So teachers basically started to call me from everywhere. They have schools called, the head teachers, the principals called because teachers have a grapevine and they talk to each other. And this whole thing started to spread and I started traveling. First, all over England. Then, into Europe. Then into North America. Then into South America. Then into Australia. Then into China. And different teachers would pick it up and they will write to me later on and say I tried it this way and it worked this way. And there is a sort of-- there is a loosely knit community that is kind of taking the whole method up. I am very happy with it because I have lost track of how many people are using it now. So, finally, what do I say about learning? Well, unfortunately I am going to lose more teacher friends (laughs), groups of children can learn anything by themselves. Okay, the process is bringing the PhD to a 6-year-old. What does the PhD student do? He is given a question to which no one has the answer. He has a supervisor who is mostly absent (audience laughs) and is left to learn to do his stuff. The only thing the universities miss is that they should put four PhD students together. (Audience laughs). So you need all this which I have described, so I will not spend time on it. You need four people, it is all documented on the web. You need a police officer to maintain law and order. You saw we had a young police officer there. One computer for each group, you can walk around, you can talk, you can change groups, you can look over other peoples shoulders, see what they are doing, come back to your own group and pretend that you found it yourself. I explained to them that I work in a university where all of these are considered valid research methods (audience laughs). So what were the questions? Because I have to get more and more ambitious, what happens to us after we die? Can trees think? Where did language come from? How does--how come apes have fur and we do not? How does an iPhone know where it is when you say my position? You know, it is crazy to see where that question takes 10 or 11 year olds. It takes them deep inside Trigonometry. And you know the kids, the same called kids who were sleeping in class, they coming up, Sugata, do you what a tangent of an angle means? And I say, Holy Tamale I do not. And so (audience laughs). And so, how does an iPhone know where it is? Why do we dream? I tried this out in Chile of all places. Right down there and the Spanish-speaking little kids and they went at it. And the first group that came up, they have to come and present their findings. The first group that came up said, Theres a difference of opinion between Professor Freud and Professor Yung but...(audience laughs). So, how did the world begin? How will it end? What is lightning? It can go on and on and on but that is the skill that the teacher needs, to convert-- to make into the right question. In the United States, my last story, in the United States, in our city, Kansas, okay, in Kansas, it took me to a school and the school principal said, You know Professor Mitra, the United States Inner-City Schools, they are different ball game. Now I have heard this from country after country, after country; I call them The condemned children. Because you know they are expected to become something and if the teachers believe that then of course, it comes true. But anyway, there I went into this real, rough you know 13-year-old children in Kansas City. So I said, I will give them the hardest question I can think of. The question was what is the purpose of theater. Their teacher said, Sugata you are mad, I mean what are you trying to do? You know I said, Well at least give me a chance. So the kids, one of the kids said, Theater, like to see movies. So I said, No, not movie theater, the English word theater. A little bit of silence then one of the kids say, You mean like drama? so I said, Yeah, like that, whats the purpose of theater? They started working, lot of noise, fighting, pushing. T he teacher say what do we do now. I said, "15 minutes. 15 minutes, the self-organizing phase begins. The questions down, the groups formed, clusters starts to appear, little muttered conversations. Another 15 minutes, time to present. I do not have time, he said, I will just give you 30 minutes. The first group comes of a group of four girls, and the first girl comes up there and says, Theater creates its own meaning. And I am afraid the principal bursts into tears (audience laughs). And so you know I have seen this happened on school to school, to school. It is just amazing. It is something we did not see before, so we are astonished by it. Remember it is self-organizing. Self-organizing systems have emergent behavior. When you look at the cocoon produced by a caterpillar, you have no clue about what is going to come out of it. And when it does, you just start of stand back in awe and say, My god, how could that happen. That is what learning I think is about. So we need three things, reading comprehension, information search and retrieval skills and a rational system of belief. You must know how to search. The most important skill, right true to higher education, t he ability to read and understand, which I am afraid is lacking, lagging behind very badly. We must emphasize that with as much money behind it as possible. Reading comprehension, when you have searched, when you have read, when you have understood, you need finally the last step to put it all together into a rational system of belief. That bit I do not know how to do yet. That is what I am working on right now. So we all have a belief engine in our heads. You listen to something and you say, Yeah, that is probably right. You listen to something else and say, I am going to cross check this. You listen to something else, you say, It is rubbish. Where is that engine? How young and age can we produce it? Getting working in that? Can we get it working in a 6-year-old mind? So and I leave you with this, maybe it might help in some of the workshops, how do you examine a connected learner? Right now, you can tell him not to bring his phone, not to bring his laptop, not to bring this and that. But those things are going to dematerialize, we have seen that happen. It is going to become smaller and cheaper. So eventually, what are we going to do? Put them through a body scanner before they come into the examination hall. You know, we have to build examinations which integrate the internet into it. What does qualification mean in the world that Sugata Mitra can become an accountant? What is curriculum in a world where subjects change daily? Example, you want to write an app, let us say you want to write an app for STEM, for mobile phones, what qualifications are you going to ask for? Computer Science? No way, the curriculum has not got up then nobody started how to write apps. So what do you look for? You look for a young man or woman, usually about 16 to 18 years old and you ask them, Have you ever written an app? Show me. And that is all you can do. So what does curriculum mean? Then there are many subjects that we need to re-look at. Arithmetic and all these gets everybody hackles up because reading, writing Arithmetic of pillars. I gave up a prize away to a 70-- to a little girl in England, she was able to recite the 17 times tables. So I congratulated her and then I said Well, what is 17 times 17. And she said, That is not allowed, it is up to 10. (audience laughs). So I said, Well do you know the 23 times tables? She says, No that is not allowed, it stops at 20. So I said but who has made this rules that it has to be from 1 to 20, it has to be times 10. It was meant at an age when a little girl with a few little coins had to go and buy bread from the market and needed to do it in her head. What are we doing filling up all those neuronal connections inside little children in the 21st century with the times tables? Is that whole thing obsolete? Is the absence of a teacher a biological tool. In the connected generation? Yes. All that they are saying is Leave us alone. Will institutions dematerialize? Will one day people walk through the corridors of Cambridge, Massachusetts and, you know, look around after having paid 19 bucks; look around and wonderingly say to each other, So that is how they use to educate. It has happened before in history, it can happen again. And finally, what will the future teacher do? Convert the curriculum into the big questions that matter. If you cannot, then it is your problem, not the students problem. You have to make a question which will turn the 14-year-old mind in such a way that he will be unable to go to sleep until he has found the answer. There are such questions. And lastly, a big question for me, is knowing obsolete? That will be a biggie. Homo sapiens, we pride ourselves on our ability to know. It is what differentiates us from animals. So you know everybody looks very gloomy at this question is knowing obsolete. But look at it another way. It took nature over a million years to convert furry apes into Homo sapiens. In 10,000, we made knowing obsolete. Thanks. (Audience claps). Thank you. (Audience continues to clap). Thank you.
