A Hole in the Wall (Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education)

Discuss

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

Robot teachers

A) But are we underestimating what robots can do? 

B) If you think of the jobs robots could never do 

C) and maybe even brain signals 

D) It's not a popular opinion  

E) One thing is certain, though 

F) That problem could be partly solved by robots 

G) British education expert Anthony Seldon thinks so 

H) Perhaps the question is not  

I) including more than 11 hours a week marking homework 

J) 'How can robots help teachers?' 

K) teachers would have more time and energy for the parts of the job humans do best. 

L) Those negative aspects of teaching 

M) Could there be a place for robots in education after all? 
 

1_________, you would probably put doctors and teachers at the top of the list. It's easy to imagine robot cleaners and factory workers, but some jobs need human connection and creativity. 2_________ In some cases, they already perform better than doctors at diagnosing illness. Also, some patients might feel more comfortable sharing personal information with a machine than a person. 3_________ 

4_________. And he even has a date for the robot takeover of the classroom: 2027. He predicts robots will do the main job of transferring information and teachers will be like assistants. Intelligent robots will read students' faces, movements 5_________. Then they will adapt the information to each student. 6_______ and it's unlikely robots will ever have empathy and the ability to really connect with humans like another human can. 

7_______. A robot teacher is better than no teacher at all. In some parts of the world, there aren't enough teachers and 9–16 per cent of children under the age of 14 don't go to school. 8 _________ because they can teach anywhere and won't get stressed, or tired, or move somewhere for an easier, higher-paid job. 

9________ are something everyone agrees on. Teachers all over the world are leaving because it is a difficult job and they feel overworked. _______ 'Will robots replace teachers?' but 10_________ Office workers can use software to do things like organise and answer emails, arrange meetings and update calendars. Teachers waste a lot of time doing non-teaching work, 11_______. If robots could cut the time teachers spend marking homework and writing reports, 12_______ 

Watch:

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

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

Children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were.

I gave a group of children —they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent. I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it. So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying." So I said, "Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. Make yourself understood to the computer."So the children said, "How do we do that." And I said, "I don't know, actually." And I left. Two months later their accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer.

Arthur C. Clarke said two interesting things, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be."  The second thing he said was that, "If children have interest, then education happens." 

I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero — I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them — they get another

I called in 26 children. They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. It's all in English, and I'm going. So I left them with it. I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. I said, "Well, did you look at any of the stuff?" They said, "Yes, we did." "Did you understand anything?" "No, nothing." So I said, "Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?" They said, "We look at it every day." So I said, "For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else."

So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances. But 30 percent is not a pass. So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. I asked that girl, "Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass?" And she said, "How would I do that? I don't know the subject." I said, "No, use the method of the grandmother." She said, "What's that?" I said, "Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic. What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more?'" She did that for two months. The scores went up to 50, which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting.

Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead. In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method. I made them into groups of four. I said, "You make your own groups of four. Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers." Remember, from the Hole in the Wall. "You can exchange groups. You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work." And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method.

The children enthusiastically got after me and said, "Now, what do you want us to do?" I gave them six GCSE questions. The first group — the best one — solved everything in 20 minutes. The worst, in 45. They used everything that they knew — news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. The teachers said, "Is this deep learning?" I said, "Well, let's try it. I'll come back after two months. We'll give them a paper test — no computers, no talking to each other, etc." The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent. There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other. A single child in front of a single computer will not do that. I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time. Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further.

So you know what's happened? I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for. Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible. I think I can make a guess now — education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.


How could the points made by Sugata be used to justify robotising education?

Does it, on the contrary, help us see that teaching isn't about giving people knowledge - a robot can do that - but engaging us with each other and the world?