Zitat des Tages von Sugata Mitra:
You can force students to learn, to a certain extent, but students aren't happy and employers aren't happy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.
Too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.
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.
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.
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?
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?
We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
