Sugata Mitra and the Enemies Within
We want to raise a warning to teachers – warning them that in their midst are some very dangerous figures. They are arguing that the practice of teaching should end – that teachers should be made redundant. This is the anti-teacher movement.
Teaching – according to the people in that movement – is a very dubious business – something that smacks of the gulag, or at the very least, that horrible kind of schooling that Pink Floyd sang about – the school as factory, churning out bricks for the walls of the economy. The impulse to teach is the impulse to dictate, to impose, to bring one’s pedagogical boot down hard on the innocent face of the child. (I exaggerate, but the implied association of teaching with Fascism is discernable.) Learning is good. Education is good (as long as there is no one at the front of the room), but teaching is bad.
This line of argument might be interesting if, in parallel, some image of a new, radically democratic form of schooling were being developed, and if this were tied to a broader understanding of how society beyond school could liberate the potential that has been going to waste for too long. But there is neither the compelling image nor the broader understanding. Instead there is a naive faith that by getting kids out of the old brick and mortar schools and getting them online, there will be an explosion of teacherless learning (with the implication that world peace will follow soon after).
Is this not just a touch naive? Admittedly, there is a lot of room for improvement in education, but anyone concerned with unsavoury influences on young children must surely be concerned about the role of things like the media, the culture industry and the broader economy. Kids grow up in a world where they are subjected to well-crafted forms of psychological manipulation as soon as they are old enough to make some sense of flashing pixels. Long before they get to see a teacher, a thousand ideas and values have been “imposed” upon them in the nicest possible way by people whose overriding interest is to make money. In such a context, some of us might entertain the hope that schools could act as a counterweight to such pernicious influences.
I find it hard to believe that the spokespeople for the anti-teacher movement have failed to see that if their plan were acted upon schooling would be handed over to the venture capitalists and big corporations that would fund the online schools. Schooling – rather than acting as a brake on economic totalitarianism – would be swallowed up entirely by the market economy. At every step, students would be slotted into the role of customers wandering (in their pyjamas perhaps) around the shiny new touch-screen shopping mall of online education. Education would be business. From the tenderest of ages, children would get the message that the world is essentially the world of business. Surely this isn’t something to be welcomed simply because there is no teacher barking at the children: “Repeat after me! The world is business. The world is business. Business is good. Business is the best.”
The most prominent spokesperson for this movement is Professor Sugata Mitra. He is a talented guy. He is able to fill an auditorium with teachers and give them a fun 20-minute Powerpoint presentation telling them that, in effect, they should all be made redundant, and the teachers leap to their feet afterwards to give him a standing ovation. It’s a crazy world.
More on Sugata Mitra
1. “Knowing is obsolete, Homo Sapiens is dead,” says Mitra. We hope not.
2. Mitra on empire and education
3. Mitra on how to outdoctrinate children
Prof. Sugata Mitra’s experiment can be called anti-teacher only if there is a teacher available. Probably you are not aware of the reality that vast number of schools in developing world are struggling to find quality teachers for their school. If you had observed his video then you must have noticed that he mentions that his experiment or suggestion is not for schools which have all the resources. But there is a vast world beyond them where students are deprived of education whose main reason is that the teachers are not available. The reasons may be remoteness of their location or absence of basic infrastructure. It is for such situations computers may help. Please do not consider this as a suggestion to do away with teachers but to find a possible solution to an impossible situation
Kajal, Thanks for leaving the comment. Of course you are right that Mitra’s initial presentation of the project makes it clear he is describing a solution to a problem in desperately deprived areas. Let’s not be naive, though, the people who jump to their feet and applaud in the TED talks are not people who are excited about a solution to poverty, rather they are excited about the more general idea of children supposedly teaching themselves online. These are the anti-teacher teachers. And Mitra himself attacks schooling beyond areas of deprivation. How about this gem from his blog: “We have to figure out how to dematerialise our institutions and convert the existing brick and mortar into museums of education where future generations will come and say, ‘Oh, so that’s how they used to educate people!'” The man is naive beyond belief, and I am astonished that people can believe that his approach is a sensible response to deprivation. Children need an education tailored to the culture that they live in – an education that will help to root them in the world which they were born into – an education that will celebrate everything that is good there. Mitra, on the contrary, is happy to see both poor and rich children growing up rootless and indoctrinated by the mediocre and cynical sales patter that abounds on the web.
I think we’re overdoing the web-bit here. The concept that I think is important relates to the children learning in groups on the basis of collectively available information. Some 20 years ago I used this approach in teaching and learning in the area of molecular virology. Usually, half-way through the semester I would get a delegation of students in my office asking me where all the information was they were supposed to learn. They provided the answer themselves in the final open-book exam, where almost no-one had time to open their books to refer to information as they were all far too busy writing down sensible answers enriched with a great deal of detail. The real cruncher was to get emails from students 2 and 3 years later thanking me for what I had taught them or to still be remembered 10 years after the sessions. What they talked about was the approach I imparted not the factual knowledge they had gained. I am not creating a plug for my self here but for cooperative group self-learning approaches !
The second part of Sugata Mitra’s argument is that you need teachers to be learning facilitators and not founts of immeasurable knowledge. Knowledge is something creating by free thinking men and women so why should we not pay attention to the ability to create knowledge until somewhere in the third decade of someone’s life. Teachers will not become redundant but how they act will have to change. Learning facilitation requires a different skill set. Encouraging young people to be inquisitive and to develop a passion for solving problems in many contexts requires specific attitudes and aptitudes. The sooner we develop these in our teacher education, the sooner we get a generation with more than a spitting chance to master problems of ever increasing complexity in this crowded world of ours.
Robert, the approach you describe in the first paragraph is lovely, and is just the sort of thing we like to do as well. A hell of a lot of education has to do with solving problems and finding and evaluating information, and it is a great idea to get the students to do that themselves. I am all for that. The problem is when knowledge is reduced entirely to information, and knowing is reduced to the ability to solve problems (whether we do it alone or in collaboration with others), and when the point of it all is supposed to be mastery. You seem to affirm that mindset – a view of cognition that we consider to be the locus of the greatest danger.
We consider that what is needed most in education is to help young people develop a deeper appreciation of the world they find themselves in. “Appreciation” is more about coming to understand oneself as part of something larger than oneself that spreads out in all directions – something that is not to be mastered, but that will rather help orient the particular activities in which we might try to achieve some limited mastery. This is not to say that problem-solving must be brushed aside. No, it shouldn’t, but outside school it is important for us to know which problems matter more than others, and to have a sense of the world we need to preserve and develop through all this problem-solving activity. For Mitra that is not an issue, but for us, as we observe an epoch careering towards economic and ecological catastrophe, it is THE issue.
The problem with the world is not with its complexity, but with the mindlessness of the forces that we are allowing to dominate – mindless forces that have been liberated and fueled precisely by the problem-solving intellect. It is a mistake to think that the problem-solving intellect (cut off from a world of value that could orient its activity) can pull itself up by its bootstraps. What is needed is a new sense of depth, of connectedness, of limitation, of the richness to be found when not insisting on the privileges of a cold, hard, problem-solving intellect – a sense of indebtedness, and a new sense not quite of guilt, but something approaching guilt, regarding what has been done in the name of mastery.
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there was a link posted on Twitter recently describing the Indian company behind the Hole in the Wall case studies http://books.google.fr/books?id=j0ZkGcoX6rsC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=Sugata+Mitra+hole+in+the+wall+ellen+seiter&source=bl&ots=SNBiMiU82B&sig=jroGFjPrYp9dgs9BbrY2nPGgpZI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FnctUdbBL46NigLD9IDIBA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Sugata%20Mitra%20hole%20in%20the%20wall%20ellen%20seiter&f=false
an eye opening read.
ta
mura
Thanks for that very useful link. I hadn’t heard of Ellen Seiter. As it turns out, for the time being at least, she is allowing a free download of her book on Scribd.com:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/40076481/Seiter-InternetPlayground
Apparently the company Sugata was working for before he got the invite to Long Beach, California is NIIT.com. The site has almost nothing about him apart from a couple of paragraphs about HIWEL Ltd. that received funding from the World Bank to make more holes in more walls.
Interesting to note that NIWEL Ltd. states its primary mission as being to “bridge the digital divide”.
http://www.slideshare.net/thinkfoundation/hiwel-brochure
Ellen Seiter seems to be arguing that this is exactly what has not happened.
The image that springs to mind is of a parallel attempt to bridge the financial divide by making other holes in the walls of slums that have holograms of piles of money that the slum dwellers can enjoy looking at to take their minds off the clawing pain of hunger.