Sugata Mitra

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.

We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.

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

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

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.

The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhaps, their schoolwork can suffer. They need to be taught to think and study for themselves.

People are adamant learning is not just looking at a Google page. But it is. Learning is looking at Google pages. What is wrong with that?

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

There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.

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.

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

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.