Sugata Mitra Quotes

Who knows what we'll need to learn thirty years from now? We do know that we will need to be good at searching for information, collating it, and figuring out whether it is right or wrong.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.

Learning is the new skill. Imagination, creation and asking new questions are at its core.

A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be.

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.

Too many pupils at schools in the U.K. want to have careers as footballers or TV hosts, or models, because that's what they're constantly exposed to as the heroes of our time.

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

Entertainment can be a more powerful driver than poverty.

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.

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.

If children have interest, then Education happens

Let children wander aimlessly around ideas.

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It's not about making learning happen; it's about letting it happen.

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.

Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning.

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.

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

I'm encouraging kids to use computers at their own pace to build aspirations.

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

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

My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.