behind Indias young minds
from a hole in the wall to a school in the cloud
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How do we spark creativity, curiosity, and wonder in children? This generation have not known a world without vast global and online connectivity. Schools today are a product of an expired age; standardised curricula, out-dated pedagogy, and cookie cutter assessments that are relics of an earlier time. Students are rewarded more for memorisation rather than imagination or resourcefulness.
In order to keep the world’s military-industrial machine running at the pinnacle of the British Empire, Victorians assembled an educational system to mass-produce workers with identical skills. Plucked from the classroom and plugged instantly into the system, citizens were churned through an educational factory engineered for maximum productivity.
"We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer, do we? So what's my wish? My wish is that we design the future of learning, by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. Help me build this school. It will be called the School in the Cloud. It will be a school where children go on intellectual adventures driven by the big questions... A Self-Organized Learning Environment. A School in The Cloud"
How do we spark creativity, curiosity, and wonder in children? This generation have not known a world without vast global and online connectivity. Schools today are a product of an expired age; standardised curricula, out-dated pedagogy, and cookie cutter assessments that are relics of an earlier time. Students are rewarded more for memorisation rather than imagination or resourcefulness.
"It's not about making learning happen, it's about letting it happen." Sugata Mitra
"What will it be tomorrow? Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? Could it be -- a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte -- could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete? But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens. Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes. But look at it this way. It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. What an achievement that is. But we have to integrate that into our own future." Sugata Mitra