School drop-out ? No more.

A warm day, in a remote village in Northeast India where no one knows a single word in English, four children were standing in a semicircle around a hole in a wall and around them were another group of 16 children. The noisy group of kids was browsing the internet and playing games on a computer whose monitor and touchpad alone were accessible through the wall. The computer and a whole lot of CDs was left there three month back by Prof. Sugata Mithra,

When he returned he found the children playing games on the computer. The first thing he heard from the children was ‘We need a faster processor and a better mouse’. This is where the CDs came in, he found that the children used more than 200 English words like ‘save’, ‘exit’, ‘back’ although mispronounced but in the right meaning. Not only when using the computer but also in their day-to-day lives. When questioned, they said, ‘you left us with this thing that only talks in English, so we had to learn it’. In other places where he left the children with internet, they were able to open websites from which they learnt the English alphabet, chat, play games, download music, and watch videos, in short what all of us do with the internet. Language seems no barrier, children could teach themselves the language if they needed it.

The availability of resources did not matter as much as we would guess. He calculates that almost 300 children could teach themselves to use a computer and browse the internet in a span of 6 months with one computer. Only one in the group operated the computer surrounded by three who were constantly instructing him, they all would fare equally well if questioned about. The other 16 children around them would also get through an examination if questioned on that subject. Unlike adults children learn as much from observing, they don’t need hands-on all the time. What we have just witnessed is that without adult supervision, 6 to 13 yr olds can self instruct in a connected environment.
The key is they have to be left in groups.
The learning curve of these children was same as children from normal schools.
More interesting facts, that in rural areas more girl children took the initiative than boys and that it is usually the younger children who teach the older ones come out of this study by Sugatha Mithra which ran over 5 years covering rural areas across the length and breadth of India. The main focus of this study was to find an alternative method of teaching where access to schools and teachers was difficult. Mithra calls his find ‘self-organized system of learning’.
Should teachers be replaced? Defenitely not. Although in places where there is no possibility of a school and where no teacher would want to stay for long, we could utilize this form of learning, where we let primary education happen by itself.

How can we take such education technology to remote villages? His answer is that the remote villages should be the first places to receive such new forms of education and the rest of the places later. There is much to be gained when we can get rural illiterate children to browse the internet than when we get the already English speaking urban school kids gain another 3% above their normal 80% score.
The educational ministry, NGOs, teachers, researchers and schools should give a serious thought to this finding.

Professor Sugata Mithra, is a proponent of ‘Minimally Invasive Education’. He is currently professor of Education Technology, NewCastle UK and Chief scientist emeritus at NIIT. The spread of research by this Dewang Metha Awardee is far reaching from energy storage systems, computer networks to human mind and education. His hole in the wall experiment is the indirect inspiration of the Oscar winning Slumdog millionaire.