2018-11-03 New Scientist Australian Edition

42 | NewScientist | 3 November 2018

I

N 1999, an inquisitive physicist named

Sugata Mitra installed a computer in a slum

in New Delhi, India, and then walked away.

Local children congregated and began trying

to use the unfamiliar device. When Mitra

returned a few days later, they had already

taught themselves to surf the internet.

Mitra is now a professor of educational

technology at Newcastle University in the

UK. In the decades since the “hole in the wall”

experiment, he has found that groups of

children aged 8 to 12, left alone with the

internet, can teach themselves even technical

subjects such as evolutionary biology to a level

several years ahead of their school age. In 2013,

he won a $1 million TED prize to help his work.

Hey, teacher! Leave

those kids alone

In a Delhi slum two decades ago, Sugata Mitra discovered

that a computer with an internet connection was enough to

harness children’s curiosity and capacity to learn. We should

learn the lesson, he tells Bob Holmes

PHILIPPE TARBOURIECH

INTERVIEW

How can children learn on their own, without

guidance?

The learning I’m talking about appears

spontaneously in response to a query, which

may be posed by an adult, or by the children

themselves. I need the internet to be available

on large, publicly visible screens in a safe space.

I need to have mixed groups of children – boys

and girls of different ages together, not each

child on a different computer. Then I need to

remove all supervision. We have got to keep

the adults away.

Everybody says, who taught them? How

clever they are! But this doesn’t have anything

to do with cleverness or teaching. It has to do

with a hive-like mind with a common desire.

But are the children really learning, or just

repeating phrases they don’t really understand?

I could give them questions on quantum

mechanics, and they would come back, not

with the understanding that a physicist like

me would have, but with a child’s

understanding. I teased 9-year-olds by saying

something could be in two places at the same

time. They said no, if you have a pencil, it is

here when you put it here and there when

you put it there. I said there are some things

that can be here and there at the same time –

then I left. They came back with quantum

entanglement, and said it means that the two

particles know about each other, but we don’t

know how those particles know.

Can children discriminate between good and

bad information on the internet? Many adults

have trouble with this.

The children get as confused as you and I.

However, when they work in groups, they can

detect extreme points of view and avoid those.

Working in groups is key: the hive mind is

more discriminating and less gullible than

an individual in front of the screen.

If I show kids a picture of the Colosseum in

Rome and ask “what’s that building? And why

is it broken?”, they come back with a lot of

information about the Roman Empire. But

now I go on to ask “how do we know what you

said is true?” They start by saying that every

website says so, which is good, but then they

start going deeper, toward understanding

historical evidence.

Children in India

worked together to

teach themselves

when provided with

a “hole in the wall”

computer