Sugata Mitra Quotations

Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers.

It's quite fashionable to say that the educational system is broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore.

My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.

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

Go to a job interview and tell and employer that you can recite the 17 times table; they don't care. Why are we still teaching it?

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.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers 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?

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

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.

Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.

You can force students to learn, to a certain extent, but students aren't happy and employers aren't happy.

I don't even want to guess at what computer literacy might do to children, except to say that if cyberspace is considered a place, then there are people who are already in it and people who are not in it.

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.

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

It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.

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

Teachers say to me, 'The internet is full of rubbish, wrong answers.' But you would be surprised how just long it takes to find wrong information on Google, and where it's not obvious that it's wrong.

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

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.

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.

Entertainment can be a more powerful driver than poverty.

In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer - in any language - would reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.

The Indian education system, like the Indian bureaucratic system, is Victorian and still in the 19th century. Our schools are still designed to produce clerks for an empire that does not exist anymore.

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.

Too many pupils at schools in the U.K. want to have careers as footballers or TV hosts, or models, because that's what they're constantly exposed to as the heroes of our time.

Education prepares to be one piece of a machine.

I don't mind children cribbing answers off other children. It's one of the ways they can learn. I also don't think there should be too many constraints on what they can look at on the Internet.

It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.

There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go.

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

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.

Ask BIG questions, find BIG answers.

My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer.

Who knows what we’ll need to learn thirty years from now? We do know that we will need to be good at searching for information, collating it, and figuring out whether it is right or wrong.

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

If children have interest, then Education happens

The bottom line is, if you're not the one controlling your learning, you're not going to learn as well.

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

You don't actually need to know anything, you can find out at the point when you need to know it. It's the teachers job to point young minds towards the right kind of question, a teacher doesn't need to give any answers because answers are everywhere.

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.

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It’s not about making learning happen; it’s about letting it happen.

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.

Knowing is NOT the most important thing. To be able to FIND OUT is more important than knowing.

My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.