3 November 2018 | NewScientist | 43them sit up and wonder. My teacher friends
tell me it is harder than preparing for a lesson
where they just read out facts.
In the 20 years I’ve been doing this
work, the opinion of teachers has changed
dramatically – from saying this is rubbish
to saying, isn’t what you say obvious?But isn’t there a set of basic knowledge that
needs to be learned by every child for them to
get by in society?
I’m very glad that you said needs to be learned,
not needs to be taught. All my work is about
making that distinction. My answer is yes, but
I’m not able to define that basic set very well.
How much should I keep in my head, and how
much should I rely on the internet? I tend
toward thinking that we should know how tomake the information infrastructure answer a
question just in time, when we need it to. This
is as opposed to the old system, which is to
teach the child everything we think they need,
just in case.
Does that mean I can go through life
without knowing what the solar system is?
That’s a horrifying thought. So perhaps we
can agree on the big questions that children
should engage with at various ages, then give
teachers the liberty to pose the questions as
they wish.Should we allow internet access during
exams, then?
I think we should. But then we have a problem:
who is going to evaluate the answer, and how?
I don’t know yet – that’s what I’m working on
now. But for example, when you are learningto play an instrument, the exam is to play the
instrument, and judges assess how good you
are. Maybe we should move toward that kind
of assessment in an internet-assisted world.If knowledge is in the cloud, not our heads,
what happens if the internet fails?
If the internet goes down, we will live very
uninformed. But that doesn’t mean that we
should learn how to live without the internet –
no more than we should learn how to tell the
time of day without looking at a watch, just in
case watches disappear. If I don’t have a watch,
I won’t be able to tell the time. Sorry.You have faced scepticism because you haven’t
published much comparative data in top-tier
journals. What has stopped you?
I find it hard to publish – I get one rejection
after another. I’m not from the social sciences.
In the natural sciences, if results are
unexpected, others repeat the experiment
and report whether they got the same results.
In the social sciences, people just seem to
point at the holes in your work, but nobody
ever says they repeated the experiment and
got something else. So I have a humble request
to social scientists: replicate my work and see
if you get the same results. ■Bob Holmes is a consultant for New ScientistSugata Mitra believes knowledge should be
learned, not taught“ You just don’t need teachers
telling children things they
can look up on their own”Is this method effective even for very
young children?
You can push it down to the point where the
child is beginning to read, which might be age
4 or 5. And it accelerates reading development.
With the TED prize, I set up labs in seven
schools – five in India and two in England.
We have got all the data now, and there is a
definite, measurable improvement in reading
comprehension over and above what would
be expected.What role does this leave for teachers,
and what do they think of your approach?
It’s not that you don’t need a teacher. You just
don’t need the teacher to tell children things
they could look up for themselves. You need
the teacher to ask them questions that makeMURDO MACLEOD