偏旁大全Sugata Mitra Build a School in the Cloud

2021年1月20日发(作者：赵力)
What is going to be the future of learning?

I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little
story, which kind of sets the stage.

I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from?
And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it
is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and
it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. [
Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without
telephones,
with
data
handwritten
on
pieces
of
paper,
and
traveling
by
ships.
But
the
Victorians actually
did it.
What
they
did
was amazing.
They
created
a
global
computer
made
up
of
people.
It's
still
with
us
today.
It's
called
the
bureaucratic
administrative
machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They
made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce
the
people
who
would
then
become
parts
of
the
bureaucratic
administrative
machine.
They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: They must have good
handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be
able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so
identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he
would
be
instantly
functional.
The
Victorians
were
great
engineers.
They
engineered
a
system
that
was
so
robust
that
it's
still
with
us
today,
continuously
producing
identical
people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are we doing with
that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we
ever are going to do anything else with it?

[

So
that's
a pretty strong
comment there. I said
schools as
we know them now, they're
obsolete. I'm not saying
they're broken. It's
quite
fashionable
to
say
that the
education
system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it
anymore. It's outdated. What are the kind of jobs that we have today? Well, the clerks are
the computers. They're there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide
those
computers
to
do
their
clerical
jobs.
Those
people
don't
need
to
be
able
to
write
beautifully by hand. They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They
do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.

Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like.
We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever
way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?

Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to
write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to
work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to
learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the same time, we also had lots
of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me,
I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter --
oh, surely she is extra- intelligent.
rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? (Laughter) What did the poor
do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a
computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a
computer to children who
never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.

The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said,
this?

And I said,

They said,

I said,

And they said,

And
I
went
away.
About eight
hours later,
we
found
them
browsing
and
teaching
each
other how to browse. So
I said,
-- How is it possible?
They don't know anything.

My
colleagues
said,

it's
a
simple
solution.
One
of
your
students
must
have
been
passing by, showed them how to use the mouse.

So I said,

So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village
where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter)
I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I
went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it.

When they saw me, they said,

(Laughter)

So I said,

And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said,
given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in
order to use it.


Here's a short glimpse from those years. That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall. On
your right is an eight-year-old. To his left is his student. She's six. And he's teaching her
how to browse. Then onto other parts of the country, I repeated this over and over again,
getting
exactly
the
same
results
that
we
were.
[
in
the
wall
film
-
1999
An
eight-year-old
telling
his elder
sister
what
to
do. And
finally
a
girl
explaining
in
Marathi
what it is, and said,

So I started publishing. I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything,
and I said, in nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language
will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West. I'd seen it happen over
and over and over again.

But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? I started
experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. There's one
community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and
they needed
good
pronunciation because
that would improve
their jobs. I gave
them a
speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said,
say.

Computer: Nice to meet you. Child: Nice to meet you.

Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I
suspect many of you know her. She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may
have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent.

So then people said, well, how far will it go? Where does it stop? I decided I would destroy
my own argument by creating an absurd proposition. I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous
hypothesis. Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil- speaking children in a
south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside
computer? And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero. I'll spend a couple of months,
I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero. I'll go back to the lab
and say, we need teachers. I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. I
put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet
about DNA replication, most of which I didn't understand.

The children came rushing, said,

So I said,

So
they
said,

can
we
understand
such
big
English
words
and
diagrams
and
chemistry?

So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said,