MProfessor Sugata Mitra wants anarchy. Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, is hard at work dismantling what he sees as the most robust yet outmoded legacy of British rule in his native India; the Educational system. An Educational system tailor made for empire building. Factories relying on rote learning and examinations to churn out the homogenous mass of human computers needed to man the empires most crowning achievement: bureaucratic machine. A system that has failed to adapt to new technology, still producing workers to the specifications of a bygone era for a future for which the skills demanded are increasingly uncertain. This Year Professor Sugata Mitra was awarded the Ted prize and one million dollar funding to further this endeavor.
Professor Sugata Mitra is a proponent of Minimally Invasive Education, a system which places the emphasis on self organized learning by students with access to the internet and teachers acting primarily as catalysts for this learning.
In his numerous talks Professor Sugata Mitra puts forth two observations:
• Good schools and good teachers are lacking in precisely those areas where they are needed most.
• Innovations in education are usually put to the test in completely the wrong place; well funded schools with already high test scores, meaning any improvement will be minimal and therefore as insignificant.
In 1999, while working as an IT teacher in New Delhi, Professor Sugata Mitra preformed an experiment to address these observations. He installed a PC with internet access into a wall in a local slum. Without any explanation he left the local children, none of which had ever used a computer before or spoke any English, to investigate his strang...
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...the results are unreliable. However the documented experiments are inspiring. One person inspired by Professor Mitra work is Vikas Swarup, author of the novel Q&A, a book latter adapted into the Oscar winning film. Slumdog Millionair.
Professor Sugata Mitra does not claim that the current educational school systems are broken, simply that they are outmoded. Drilling specific faculties and relentless examination of a string of memorized facts tend to make for a very specific skill set. A skill set with is becoming increasingly obsolete. An Industry producing cookie-cutter workers while letting down vast numbers of otherwise perfect capable individuals. The shape our Educational systems impose on students no longer correspond to shape of their world. As Professor Mitra puts it: “In a networked age, we need schools, not structured like factories, but like clouds.”
Only now is evidence emerging testifying to the fact that much of the criticism leveled at public schools is exaggerated and misplaced. It is easy to forget that schools reflect what is happening in society, not cause it. Schools of today have recently shown that they are performing better than ever. Unfortunately, the traditional challenges confronting schools have increased dramatically and broadly as the world and students have changed. Now schools are facing drastic change -- necessary change that must take place quickly so students are able to cope in a dramatically changing world of the future. All of the criticism creates fear in teachers and administrators rather than a desire to embrace change.
Schooling has a lot of problems that need a lot of solutions. Many of these problems stem from the fact that the American school system is notorious for wasting the time of students and teachers. Students rarely get the chances to learn and experience topics that not only interest them but are also topics that have the potential for being important in their future careers. Time is also wasted during standardized tests that do not give American students an accurate representation of their intelligence compared to the intelligence of others worldwide.
Mehta, Jal. "Why American Education Fails." Foreign Affairs 2013: 105-16. MasterFILE Main Edition. Web. 31 Jan. 2014. .
For decades now, there have been educational problems in the inner city schools in the United States. The schools inability to teach some students relates to the poor conditions in the public schools. Some of the conditions are the lack of funds that give students with the proper supplies, inexperienced teachers, inadequate resources, low testing scores and the crime-infested neighborhoods. These conditions have been an issue for centuries, but there is nothing being done about it. Yet, state and local governments focus on other priorities, including schools with better academics. It is fair to say that some schools need more attention than other does. However, when schools have no academic problems then the attention should be focused elsewhere, particularly in the inner city schools.
Education is an integral part of society, school helps children learn social norms as well as teach them how to be successful adults. The school systems in United States, however are failing their students. In the world as a whole, the United States is quickly falling behind other countries in important math and reading scores. The United States ranked thirtieth in math on a global scale and twentieth in literacy. This is even more true in more urban, lower socio-economic areas in the United States. These schools have lower test scores and high dropout rates. In Trenton Central High School West, there was an 83% proficiency in literacy and only 49% of the students were proficient in math. Many of these students come from minority backgrounds and are often from low income families. There are many issues surrounding these urban schools. There is a severe lack of proper funding in these districts, and much of the money they do receive is sanctioned for non-crucial things. Schools also need a certain level of individualization with their students, and in many urban classes, this simply does not happen. While there are many factors affecting the low performance of urban schools, the lack of proper funding and distribution of funds, the cultural divide between teachers and students in urban districts, along with the lack of individualization in urban classrooms are crucial reasons to explain the poor performance in these districts. Through a process of teacher lead budget committees and further teacher education, urban schools can be transformed and be better equipped to prepare their students for the global stage.
A majority of our school system has not been keeping up with the rest of the world. If you compare our schooling system and standards to other parts of the world you will see that there is connection between them. What needs to change in our system that can improve according to Gatto is that the school system should allow student to learn what they want and allow teachers to teach how they want, in order to give the people a sense of individualism and creativity not to make them into drones of
However, it is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the boards of governors, nor the ministries of education, would countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.
The education system has been a controversial issue among educators. Requirements of school do not let student choose what they want to study for their future. It’s a big issue to force student study specific curriculums, which don’t help them improve, and what they like to create something. Educators choose a general system for education to all students which based on general knowledge. Intelligent or genius students have to be in that system of education, which doesn’t let them improve their creativity. Educators attempt to change that system to make it better, but their changing was not that great to be an example for the world. Also, did that change qualify education system to compete other systems or not? In some examples and reasons have been made me agree with some of points from Gatto’s and Edmunson’s and disagree them.
Public schools today face several issues that affect the standard of education our children are receiving. They face issues such as teachers with limited experience. Budget cuts, dilapidated facilities, not enough teachers, and school violence, lack of parent participation, and
Considering our students, the education system has left myself as well as many other students battling with weaknesses due to the constant worry to compete rather than teach. The requirements and the motives of No Child Left Behind has made a negative impact on myself, due to teachers teaching the test in order to keep their funding. The Common Core and No Child Left Behind are both numbers driven. While teachers focus on keeping their funding, the government is focused on ranking and less about the minds of our future, our students.
Subrahmanyam, K. (2000). The Impact of Home Computer Use on Children’s Activities and Development: The Future of Children and Computer Technology, 10(2), 123-143. Retrieved from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/Web/People/kraut/RKraut.site.files/articles/subrahmanyam00-Compute%26kids.pdf
However, if we analyse how education is currently we see that these advanced systems can help students develop their skills and the way, how students and teachers communicate. In other hand this systems let students fully dependent of them, in some cases students have difficult to think by
In the Ted Talk Sugata Mitra: The Child-Driven Education, Mitra talks about various experiments he has set up in various parts of India. These experiments involving the use of computers by the children of India. Many strong points were made, one of which, really stands out out of all of them. Computers could revolutionize the way children learn today, especially in places where teachers are needed most. Places where good teachers won't go. Children who are inquisitive enough will become self sufficient in their own learning. I believe that Sugata Mitra's thoughts on revolutionizing children's education are valid because children will learn about what they are interested in, little background knowledge is needed with computers to figure out how to use them, and the results of these experiments proved to be extremely progressive for education in India.
In an age of rapid change due to so many technology and innovative advances, a revolutionary change in the educational system is as vital as what our next energy source is. Education is the most powerful wealth in the world and it demands more attention, and where better to start with than out youth. The school system will soon go out of date due to the information highway and information availability if there isn?t a dramatic change in the way things are run in our domestic institutional facilities. The reason why college was such a success in the 20th century was because books were all of a sudden available to students on university campus. Now with internet, a student could specialize their profession solely with the computer with the click of a button. Something needs to be done to smoothen the rigid gaps and cracks in the school system before the technological pace at which we are advancing decides to bring the whole thing down.
In the early 1980’s Britain introduced computers to schools. Due to inadequate investment by the government, every school was only provided with one computer. Many of the schools did not use the computers as the teachers were not trained properly and so could not deal with them. In addition there was not a simple upgrade policy and so complete purchasing has frequently meant that before long schools have outdated hardware. Moreover, information communications technology of any sort was only utilised by fascinated teachers, however it was not taught as a separate subject.