Prepare to be challenged and inspired as we dive headfirst into the world of education with none other than Professor Sugata Mitra. Known for his pioneering "hole in the wall" experiment, Mitra's insights into the power of peer teaching, the role of AI, and the necessity of forward-thinking education are set to revolutionize the way we think about learning. His experience with minimally invasive education, particularly in chaotic environments, introduces a fresh perspective on the value of technology in our classrooms. Professor Mitra also confronts the traditional paradigms of education and delves into COVID's impact on education. Tune in and join us for this enlightening discussion on the future of education!
Learn more about Sugata Mitra
Watch his TED talks
Prepare to be challenged and inspired as we dive headfirst into the world of education with none other than Professor Sugata Mitra. Known for his pioneering "hole in the wall" experiment, Mitra's insights into the power of peer teaching, the role of AI, and the necessity of forward-thinking education are set to revolutionize the way we think about learning. His experience with minimally invasive education, particularly in chaotic environments, introduces a fresh perspective on the value of technology in our classrooms. Professor Mitra also confronts the traditional paradigms of education and delves into COVID's impact on education. Tune in and join us for this enlightening discussion on the future of education!
Learn more about Sugata Mitra
Watch his TED talks
So, if you're the head of a school, don't bring up a child the way you were brought up. Don't bring up a child to fit into your past. Bring up a child to fit into their future.
Speaker 2:In this episode, I was honored and privileged to sit down virtually across the Atlantic Ocean with Sugata Mitra. Professor Mitra is an Indian computer scientist and educational theorist. He's best known for his hole in the wall experiment and he's widely cited in works on literacy and education. He's a professor emeritus at NIIT University in Rajasthan, india, with a PhD in theoretical physics. He retired in 2019 as professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in England, where he'd served for 13 years. Included in that time, he did a year in 2012 as visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, massachusetts. In 2013, professor Mitra won the prestigious TED Prize.
Speaker 2:Professor Mitra and I cover a lot of ground, from the role of AI, students who think differently, the power of students teaching students, the power of groups to keep individuals accountable, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Professor Mitra. Welcome to the Superintendent's Hangout, where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general, and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, dr Sharedda. Come on in and hang out, professor Mitra. Welcome to the Hangout podcast. I really, really appreciate you joining us from halfway around the world this evening. For you, it's morning here, thank you.
Speaker 1:It's always a pleasure to speak to California.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the wonders of modern technology. We can do this right. Right, I know technology will be woven throughout today's conversation appropriately, but I was wondering if you could start by sharing with our listeners your origin story, where you come from, what your work life has been, what your non-work life has been that leads you to this present moment.
Speaker 1:I would describe my life as a series of fortuitous accidents. I started out as a physicist. That's what I did in university. I was always interested in how things work and, more importantly, as my kind of ex-byline says, why are we the way we are? I started out with physics because physics seems to be kind of just after philosophy. Physics looks at these questions. I landed myself into theoretical physics. I did a PhD in theoretical physics on organic semiconductors. Back in the 1970s people didn't even know what they were. Today, of course, you have television screens which are made up of organic semiconductors. Anyway, I did all of that.
Speaker 1:What happened was that if anybody was doing a PhD in the 1970s in physics, they would be among very few people who knew how to write computer programs. The maths guys knew how to do it and we, the physics guys, knew how to do it. Nobody else really did, because it was a big deal. Computers were great, big, huge things that were mainly inside universities. There are a few large corporates and so on. So there we were.
Speaker 1:I came out of the PhD and the industry in India. I was in New Delhi, india at that time. My PhD was from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. Guys in New Delhi said hey, what's your PhD on? I said physics, and they said, never mind, you know how to write computer programs. Right? I said, yes, I do.
Speaker 1:So I got my job, my first job as a computer programmer. It paid a lot more than physicists were paid in those days. So I was. And then my boss said but for heaven's sake, you've got a PhD. How can you just be a computer programmer? You should be teaching people how to write programs.
Speaker 1:So I became a very reluctant teacher. There I was in front of a whole bunch of grown up kids. We were trying to teach them what computer programming is. So I decided that this is not for me. So I still remember in one of my first classes I put up a big computer program on the screen and I said guess what this is? And then this and my students said we don't know. I mean, it's not in English and it looks like a kind of a poem or something. So I said well, it's called a computer program and it makes a computer do things.
Speaker 1:And that particular program was a game called Hangman in those days, and what I'd done was I'd put a bug in the program so that Hangman would play, and then it would kind of freeze up and stop and I said there's a mistake in the program somewhere. Now here's your first assignment. You've got to find out where that mistake is. And my class said out of your mind, I mean, we don't even know what that thing is that you've put up there, the thing that looks like a poem. So I said, well, I mean, that's my assignment, tell me, why don't you give it a shot? And to cut the long story short, I held my breath for a couple of days. It took them two days and they sorted the problem out and I said well, how did you figure out that that was the mistake? And they said well, we kind of discussed this, we tried this, we tried that and we kept on doing trial and error and then finally it all worked out and it started working. So I said wow, so that means you know how to debug a computer program, even though you don't know how to write one. And I bet you could even write one if you really had to. Anyway, so that was my first introduction to the fact that people can actually teach themselves things if there was sufficient motivation to do so.
Speaker 1:Ok, jump forward from the 1970s, 20 years into the 1990s Now, rich people had computers. If, for those of you listening who might remember the 1990s, we used to have desktop computers and they were like $50,000 each or something like that, and a few people, well, sorry, not $50,000, $50,000 rupees, which is like about $1,500, $2,000. And back in 1990s $2,000 was a lot of money Even now, but at that time it could easily be a month salary for anybody. So not too many people had these home computers. A few did.
Speaker 1:And the ones who did all started saying something very interesting for me. They said you know what? Sugata, that's my name, sugata. You know what? My little girl, she's only eight, I think she's gifted. So I said oh wow, why is that? Well, I told her not to touch the computer and she didn't touch it because I said this is expensive, complicated machine. It's called a computer, it's daddy's machine, you don't touch it.
Speaker 1:But then I was struggling to do something on the computer, to find a file or something like that on the computer, and this little voice from the back said why don't you try slash d-i-r, slash w, slash p, enter. So they said you know, I thought she must be gifted. How did she know that. And then I heard these stories over and over again of little eight-year-olds and nine-year-olds doing all kinds of things, even though they're not even allowed to touch the computer. So I figured they must have been watching their dads from the back. But how did they pick up this stuff?
Speaker 1:I decided that I would find out how these children had suddenly become gifted, so to speak. I mean, it isn't possible that only rich people who had computers, only their children, became gifted. It must be something that any child can do. So back in the January of 1999, I took a computer from my office. I went outside in New Delhi. My office bordered a large, sprawling urban slum which had lots of children doing nothing much, just fooling around. There was a boundary wall. So I cut a hole inside this wall and I stuck that computer, the head of the computer, the monitor, through that hole and I took a touchpad and I kind of hung it on the outside of the wall.
Speaker 1:I sort of fixed it there with a bit of cement. So from the slum side of the wall you would see this little blue square of the screen and a touchpad, and it was running Microsoft Windows, whatever version there was in 1999. It was three feet off the ground and people said those kids, they're not very good kids, they're going to throw stones at it or they're going to just smash it. What do you think you're going to do? I mean, they've never seen a computer before. They don't know what the internet is, so what do you think will happen? So I said well, that's exactly what I want to find out. I want to see how long it takes for them to just smash it and break it, as you said. Well, they didn't do any of those things by the end of the day. They were browsing this is not going to surprise you in 2023, but they were browsing and they were teaching each other how to browse In English. For heaven's sake, how did they know English in New Delhi? We still don't know the answer to that question very well, except to say that maybe language is something that groups of children can pick up by themselves. Sounds absurd, but maybe if the computer was running in Chinese instead of English, they would have picked up Chinese. Anyway, I observed this for a while. In about four or five weeks' time they were downloading games and playing them. I still remember the website was Disneycom and it had these Mickey Mouse games in it and I asked the children what's that? And they said it's a rat game. I said a rat game. They said yeah, don't you see that rat over there on the screen? I said he's not a rat, he's called Mickey Mouse and he looks like a rat. They said so that was the beginning of an experiment that later got to be called the hole in the wall. In a month they discovered the search engine. Google wasn't around, so whatever there was, they started and in about two months' time they could answer pretty difficult questions by themselves.
Speaker 1:I published all of that. I didn't try to pretend I was a social scientist. I published it the way an experimental physicist would publish. I just said this is what I did and this is what I saw. If you don't believe it and I didn't write that, but if you don't believe it, you could try it yourself. That's the way physics works. You do an experiment, you say this is how what I did, this is what I saw. And others say, ok, let me try that. And then they say, well, yeah, it does work that way. And that's exactly what happened to the hole in the wall.
Speaker 1:Within a few months, by the beginning of 2000, I got called to a big conference by the United Nations in Kuala Lumpur, malaysia, to describe the hole in the wall and I said this is what happened. And people said but who taught them? And I said, quite honestly, I don't know. And they said are you sure? Nobody came on their side of the wall? And I said, yeah, I mean, I wasn't there 24 by 7, but yeah, I'm pretty much sure nobody taught them.
Speaker 1:Anyway, up short of it was, I got some funding from the World Bank who said if there is any chance that what you're saying is right, then you should demonstrate this and figure out what's going on. So, with that funding, I repeated the experiment all across India and Cambodia in about 24 different places slums and villages and cities and everywhere, and we found the following groups of children given access to the internet and basically learn, learn, yes, learn anything by themselves, and people would stop me at the word anything, and you sure you know what you're talking about. But by then I was sure I had asked children questions like find out what the words DNA means, and left nine-year-old Tamil speaking South Indian children in a village with a single computer in the wall and in two months they would come back and say well, it was very difficult. What you asked us is very difficult. It's full of chemistry, you know I mean. Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we've understood nothing at all. I said, okay, and this big haunting question who is teaching them? Well, it took more than 10 years to find out. The answer came out, not in India, but in England In 2006, I took these results to England. I had just been appointed professor of educational technology me a theoretical physicist professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in England. I went there and I repeated this experiment in a town called Gateshead, where I live now A relatively poorer area of England and I repeated the experiment inside their classrooms and they would again, like the children in India, answer very difficult questions by themselves.
Speaker 1:It looked as though a chaotic situation of children and a question in the presence of the internet starts to produce emergent learning. You know the way a dust devil forms when there's this gusts of wind and suddenly you find this spiraling dust devil. In physics we call it emergent phenomenon and I said, wow, I think I just found an emergent phenomenon. Learning is an emergent phenomenon. In a chaotic educational environment, this was completely unknown at that time. It was quite unacceptable to an education system which believed that teaching and learning has to be one way from the teacher to the learner. How can your learning? Just popping out of it anyway.
Speaker 1:So anyway, but by 2010, the smartphone had made its inroads that we all know, and children were beginning to do some very strange things with these smartphones. The adults watching them said they're wasting time, they're playing games all the time. Social media is going to ruin their lives. It reminded me of my childhood, when the Sony Walkman had been invented in the 1960s. I was 10 years old and the Beatles were playing their music.
Speaker 1:My father would say to my mother this generation is going to the dogs. They've got music in their years, 24 by 7. And you call that music? I mean, what is that thing they're listening to? This is the end, you would say. I heard that voice many years later, back in England and in India, with children and smartphones. I still hear it today all over the world. This generation, you know they're just going to go down the drain with social media and all of this, but nothing of the sort is happening. According to me, what we are seeing is a surge of emergent learning and a new generation that's kind of beginning to form in front of our eyes. So, anyway, I've spoken enough about this. This is where I am right now.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate that overview, and I stumbled upon the holding the wall experiment in a TED Talk that you did. I was on an airplane and I downloaded a bunch of education TED Talks to buy the time and so I watched it. I thought, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I remember sharing it with staff at the time that was probably seven, eight years ago or more and then I just yeah, more, and it kind of dropped off my radar and then came back recently, and so that's why I was like I would love to just talk to Professor Mitra and get his perspective now. And you touched a little bit on the role of smartphones and of course, the technology is now ubiquitous and cheap. You coined this term I think you coined it minimally invasive education. Yes, you've written about it. Can you explain what that is and how that ties into both the hole in the wall and then the way you see education systems more broadly worldwide?
Speaker 1:Well, around the time when I was doing the first of the hole in the wall experiments, I was also involved in another project, another accidental project a famous heart surgeon in New Delhi who used to do surgeries on the human heart and other organs using what we call keyhole surgery. You know I mean all of us know that now. You know, make a little puncture and you put in, you don't actually cut people open and you fix things inside and then take your instruments out. It's called minimally invasive surgery.
Speaker 1:Around the time I was discovering learning as an emergent phenomenon and I said well, what does the teacher do here? And people said you know, sugata, are you saying teachers are not required? And I said, no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying teachers have to ask a question rather than give an answer. And when you ask the question, the learning starts happening by itself if you have the internet available at the same time. So I called it minimally invasive education. So not many people know the history of this. You know the fact that I had something to do with minimally invasive surgery and that's how this word came in. So so that was the origin of the word minimally invasive education.
Speaker 2:How would you think about that concept in the context of the greater education system? And I'm thinking, you know, locally here in the United States, where we've got a slew of state standards that are requirements for teaching and learning, measurable outcomes? We've got a host of social, socioeconomic, layered challenges that our schools face. I know that's not unique to the United States Political pressures, student conduct, all these different pieces. How should an educator think about minimally invasive education in that context? Right, a cynical teacher will say, oh yeah, it's really cool, right, like I can just ask a question and just sit here. Meanwhile my class is chaos and I need to meet these standards and the principal's coming in and asking me why my classroom is in disorder. How should we think about that?
Speaker 1:We need to address that, because these are really important issues, and you're absolutely spot on when you said about what you said about teachers. That it's not that teachers don't understand what I'm talking about. They just say we are not free to apply it because we have a state which tells us what they expect us to produce, and in order to produce that, I can't say that. All you need is a bit of chaos and it's going to happen. It doesn't work that way. So they are right. It's a problem that I've faced for the last 25 years during which I did this work. Where does that come from? Well, first of all, it comes from standardization. What does standardization mean? Standardization means you want people to be identical. That is the desired outcome of any school. I know it will sound horrible, but what you actually want is a cookie cutter. We even want our children in a school to wear the same clothes, and we use the English word uniform. I mean, how much closer can you get to cookie cutter? They have to look the same, they have to behave the same way. We call that norms. They have to speak the same way, they have to know the same things and they have to be able to solve the same problems. This is the system we're in.
Speaker 1:Where did it come from? According to me, it came from two big empires the British Empire and the Prussian Empire. Both were pre-industrial revolution. They didn't have computers, they barely had any machines when they started off in the 17th century or whatever it is. So all the work that's done by machines today was actually done by people. So if people had to do the work that machines do, which is the kind of repetitive work that a machine does, then obviously people have to be trained to be identical, to be able to do the same things over and over again. Think of a factory assembly line, every worker kind of doing the same thing over and over again. So in order to keep running those empires, they had to invent an education system that would produce these identical people Identical people to run governments, identical people to run the bureaucracy, identical people to run the factories, identical people to consume the goods that are produced. That makes for a good quality 18th century empire. But it's not the 18th century anymore and the empires have disappeared, but the schooling system has not. It still remains, only because I think we find it comforting. You know, you have a child, it's a. Send them to a school. Send her to a school. Send her to a good school. What's a good school? A good school is one that will produce the right shaped cookie, just like all their peers, so that your daughter or your son doesn't stand out of the crowd, doesn't get called a weirdo.
Speaker 1:My generation, the baby boomers, tried to break out of that and those of you who know that generation will know that we tried in every wrong way. We grew our hair, we smoked pot, we behaved abominably badly, we decided never to join the army. We did all of that and we failed. By and large. We failed and we became retired baby boomers.
Speaker 1:The cookie cutter continued to take over and produce more cookies In the middle of all that. You need to have innovation, because the industrial age gave over to the information revolution, the knowledge economy, etc. Etc. We all know that story and even though we know that the kids and I will say kids that the kids who produced this entire revolutionary new world, even though we know that those kids were never from the cookie cutter generation or they were not, they were the bad products of the cookie cutter even though we know that, we still want to say no, we've got to produce the perfect cookies.
Speaker 1:This problem cannot be solved by teachers, because you know teachers don't make policies. Teachers follow policies. Why will the policy makers not change the policy? Because inside a democratic system you've got to keep the parents happy. You can't go to a parent and say that we are going to remove standardization. Okay, at least not in so many words. From the limited experience that I have, a pretty large amount of limited experience that I have all around the world, what parents say is don't try it with my child.
Speaker 2:Right, try it with someone else's child.
Speaker 1:Yeah, try it with someone else's child. And this is a problem that the politician faces when they try to make any change, any major change inside the education system. Anyway, what should we do? Well, I think the first step is that we've got to change the standardized testing system to something else, which means we've got to change the assessment system. If we change the assessment system, imagine for a moment that there was an exam question which said find out how you can make nickel look like silver, Use your smartphones. If you had a question like that and if teachers knew that that was going to be a part of the government examining system, then they would encourage their children to learn how to search properly on the internet, to distinguish between fake stuff and real stuff, etc. But they don't do that because they know that there's never going to be a question of that kind. Instead, what's the question that you'll get?
Speaker 1:Solve the following quadratic equation. What's 21st century child's response to that? According to me, it should be give me my phone back. Yeah, Hahaha, so, but you know I mean we're living in some sort of denial. We still insist that, no, you've got to be able to figure out the solution to this quadratic equation without using your phone, why? According to me, it's like asking someone to tell the time and then say but don't look at your watch. Right, what's the point if you can Suppose you had the tremendous talent that you could, you know, look up at the sky and then say, oh it's, you know, quarter to seven, but do we care? So why not let them look at their watch? I mean, they don't have watches anymore, Anyway, they all have a phone instead. So, and that phone can tell them a lot more than just the time.
Speaker 1:So if we, if we change the assessment system easier said than done, but if we could change the assessment system, the entire system of education will change. So if you are the head of a school, you know that you cannot change the assessment system. The government has to change it for you. But before that, those final years of schooling, you do have the opportunity to change the assessment system for the younger kids so that they are prepared for the world that they're going to enter. And then, by the time they get onto, you know, your 10th year or 11th year of school, you get them back in line and say guys, you've got to go for standardized testing. We, at the moment have to have this dual system. That's what a good school should be about right now.
Speaker 2:It's interesting as you speak about the weight of politics and in a democratic society. My whole career in charter schools which you know, you're aware, of course, in the United States are all over the country now and California has, I think, 1500 charter schools across the state serving almost a million students, and we're publicly funded. We have greater accountability, so our schools come up for renewal every five years in exchange for supposedly supposedly greater latitude, flexibility et cetera to implement innovative programs. In my time in charters I went, I've experienced, from the early days 30 years ago, where teachers didn't even need to have a state teaching credential, state testing was optional to today where I would posit that most charter schools feel like the public school down the block in terms of 30 kids in a room, a teacher, one way, delivery of content, same accountability, same teacher credentialing requirements, and oftentimes teachers are joining charter schools and they don't even distinguish between that charter school and the traditional district school down the block. And it's you know, I can see those forces. It's politics, it's also organized labor, obviously. In California I don't know how many tens of thousands of teachers are part of bargaining units, so that's a thing too right. It's really hard to reform and shift this conversation.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate you bringing attention to the assessment piece. In fact, right before I hopped on this call with you, I was meeting with my leadership team and we were debating. Well, we weren't debating because we don't have a choice, but we were trying to decide on how we can space out the required assessments that the state and the district require of us so that we don't overwhelm our students in first, second, third grade You're talking about six, seven, eight-year-old students because there's so many required assessments that it's exhausting for the students, and so I think it's really interesting that you bring that up. What have some of your critics said about your work? I mean, I know you have critics because your work is groundbreaking and nothing groundbreaking happens without people opposing you in the opposite direction. What have your critics said about your work and how do you counter those arguments?
Speaker 1:Well, as you said, I have a group of critics who fortunately for me, I don't have too many, I must say those teachers who have tried what I have suggested about this kind of self-organized learning by the way, the system is now called a soul, a self-organized learning environment those teachers who have tried it, they would generally agree that it works almost exactly the same way everywhere, and everywhere means everywhere, from Australia to Canada. However, there are a couple of interesting criticisms. The first criticism is about the hole in the wall. Somebody went to the places where I put in these hole in the wall experiments about 15 years after the experiment got over and she found that in several places, wherever she went, the computer was missing. There was just an empty hole. She wrote a paper saying the hole in the wall doesn't work. So I was kind of taken aback. I said well, her observation is good that none of those public computers lasted. But her conclusion what does hole in the wall working mean? I thought to myself. If you look at the Los Alamos laboratories, where the atomic bomb was first made, it's now a ramshackle old building with rusting equipment lying around. It is a tourist attraction, I imagine if a researcher went over there, took a look around and said the atomic bomb doesn't work, it's something like that. So I said for heaven's sake, my funding ran out in one year and you've gone back there 20 years later and said that stuff is not there. I mean, what did you expect? But some good came out of that criticism. Not all the hole in the walls had disappeared. The ones that lasted are the ones that were built inside schools not inside classrooms, but in playgrounds in schools and so on. And I said, wow, so a computer as a public facility for education doesn't last, because the community doesn't know what it's for. They think it's a kind of a free video game. So who's going to keep sustaining it and paying for it and so on? They just let it rubbish itself. But inside the school there's an infrastructure which keeps it running. So this first piece of criticism actually turned out to be positive, that self-organized learning environments will last inside an institution and not outside it. It is not anti-institution, it has to be in it. And that is when it led my thinking into this whole idea of if the institution were to change, keep the hole in the wall or self-organized learning environments running, then they would need to be driven by a different assessment system. So that was one piece of criticism On the pedagogical side.
Speaker 1:The other piece of criticism is that when children look up stuff on the internet, their knowledge could either be superficial or incorrect. I'll take the second one first. Let me tell you this it's non-intuitive, but when groups of children look for the answer to a question on the internet, it's very important that there should be groups of children. The groups should also be able to talk to each other. So if you have 24 children, give them six computers, so they form roughly groups of four. They examine the question, they talk to each other. If you set up that environment, they never, never get to an incorrect answer. They can correct each other and find what the right answer is. I've seen children quickly catch on to the fact that there's a fake website or there's wrong information, et cetera, just it alone. Then that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:It's almost like a Wikipedia.
Speaker 1:Exactly it is. In fact, physicists know about this, except they don't know about it in the social context. But we've always known that hives, for example beehives, are chaotic systems where you get order coming out of it. Provided you have a lot of bees around, you get order out of chaos. If there are a lot of ants around, you see them marching in a straight line, collecting food and so on. An individual ant cannot do any of those things. So also in the case of self-organized learning, so it is, they don't get to incorrect stuff.
Speaker 1:But what about this whole idea of superficial? So you might say, okay, you give a quadratic equation to a child and say solve that quadratic equation, and you're allowed to use your phone and she just types it in and boom, she gives you the answer and this is a correct answer, and so. But she doesn't really know how to solve it. So I tried to examine this question of what does really know mean? And guess what? I couldn't find an answer. Nobody knows what really knows means, although we use that all the time. He doesn't really know, she doesn't really know, but we don't know what really know means. So why not make a pragmatic definition of knowing that? If your answer is correct. I don't care how you got to it, because really know doesn't know mean anything at all. So that second criticism, that the knowing is superficial, is perhaps something that is coming from our intuitive understanding of what we, the previous generation, call knowing. It's a big thing for us. You go to school, you become educated so that finally you know. And what does that mean?
Speaker 1:Let me give you an example. In Calcutta, india, where I spend a part of my year every year, I once asked a Uber taxi driver how comfortable are you with a map? And he said what's a map? I said that thing you're looking at on the screen when you're driving. He said oh, that is very useful. It tells me where to go. I mean, I wouldn't be able to do anything, I wouldn't be able to drive at all if I didn't have that thing to tell me where to go. So I said that's called a map and he said that's very interesting. So he didn't really know, but he could get you from point A to point B, which is what his job was.
Speaker 1:So after several such examples, I wrote an article called the End of Knowing and people hated it. They hated the title, they didn't even want to read what's below that title the end of knowing. A lot of them said now this guy, mitra, is saying that it's the end of knowledge. And I said, for heaven's sake, that's not what I said. I said it's the end of knowing. I didn't say it's the end of knowledge. They couldn't even make that distinction. Anyway, the book got published and it's an interesting little history For those of you who remember the name Seymour Papert, professor Seymour Papert of MIT, who wrote a book 50 years ago called Children, computers and Powerful Ideas.
Speaker 1:Seymour Papert is a legend. One of his students, gary Stager, who stays somewhere near Los Angeles, decided to commemorate his book after 50 years with an edition called 50 Years Forward or something like that. Anyway, his book was full of essays from people writing about education and one of those I'm very proud to say one of those is my chapter and it's called the End of Knowing. So in that I tried to say that you no longer need to understand what we describe as fundamentals in order for you to be able to say I really know.
Speaker 1:Take computer programming. You can learn how to write a computer program quite easily. In my days, in the 70s, there were things called assembly level programming and machine level programming. Machine level programming was done with only ones and zeros. It looked like nothing on Earth People who could do that. Well, they were the gurus of programming. They really knew how to write programs, because that's the basis of computer programming.
Speaker 1:But to today's programmer, if you say, what kind of a programmer are you? Do you know machine language? And he would say what's that? Like my Uber taxi driver in Calcutta who didn't know what a map was. So it's a new kind of way in which we handle knowledge.
Speaker 1:When knowledge is prepackaged, electronic and ubiquitously everywhere, the whole idea of knowledge changes, the whole idea of knowing changes. And that is the world in which our children have to be brought up. So if you're the head of a school, don't bring up a child the way you were brought up. Don't bring up a child to fit into your past. Bring up a child to fit into their future. And what do we know about their future? Well, an eight year old by the time she is 38, might be living on Mars. In what way are we preparing her for that? By solving quadratic equations? By working out averages? Maybe? Yes, I don't know. But have we thought of that? Have we thought of preparing her for that world which is coming, the world where the answer to anything is the ability to ask the right question. We just entered, over the last one year, into the world of AI, which can tell you the answer to anything, provided you know what to ask. Is that very new? This whole idea that the question is more important than the answer? It's not new.
Speaker 1:You know that there are people a lot bigger than me who have said this, and they've said this more than 2000 years ago. Remember Socrates? Remember the Buddha? They both said approximately the same thing the question is more important than the answer. We lost sight of them. We didn't actually lose sight of them, we hated them. Remember what we did to Socrates? We killed him. So we didn't know because we were after the answers. The wise guy is the guy who knows all the answers, but we have to change that. The wise guy is the guy who knows how to ask the right questions.
Speaker 1:I have a couple of papers on what sort of a curriculum would pandare or cater to that kind of education? What kind of assessment should we have? Will we get there? I'm quite hopeful we will. You know why? Not because governments are going to change or bureaucracies are going to be different. Your parents are going to change. Not because of all of that, because we have no option.
Speaker 1:There is a generation that is out of hand. It's happened right under our noses, but they're out there and they live a life where knowing is not important. Just to give an example, I would say that just as, maybe about 20 years from now, a child might ask you what does driving mean? You would say you have a steering wheel and you have a couple of pedals and you press the pedals and turn the wheel and the car goes. The child might say you mean in your generation you used to have cars which moved with pedals, like we have for babies. You'd say no, no, no, the pedals are different, and so on and so forth. But they might say what does driving mean? Even more bone-chillingly, that generation may ask what does knowing mean?
Speaker 2:I was struck by the fact that you empowered students to write the forward to one of your books and I was touched in reading that. I was touched by what the children said For the listeners. They kind of crowdsourced the forward. First of all, they didn't know what a forward was, so you said, hey, I think this was in England. You said, hey, I'm writing a book and I've been working with you and your teachers. I'd like you to write the forward. And they didn't know what that was, so they had to figure out what that was. And then they wrote this beautiful forward that was very empowering of student voice and the students, not in a disrespectful way, but they basically were saying, hey, adults, get out of the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and so I was struck in reading some of your research and you're reporting about the fact that your critics assumed that children were going to access inappropriate sexually explicit material on the computers because they were unsupervised. But in fact you found that on the very few computers where that had happened, it had been accessed by adults. Yeah, and I hope that speaks to this undervaluing or underestimating of the capacity of children.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely. This whole issue of inappropriate sexual material used to sort of haunt me back in the late 1990s when I was first doing these experiments, until I discovered that groups of children or groups of anybody you know you know what groups don't do pornography most of the time. Imagine a computer screen that is, you know, really large, let's say four feet diagonal computer screen, and put that into your living room and unlock all the filters on it. Put the internet on. Now get a bunch of adolescents and say, okay, go ahead. And, you know, look at all the porn sites you ever wanted to. I don't think you'll find them looking at even one, simply because it's in public view.
Speaker 1:What's wrong with our system right now are these little devices, you know, the little devices whose screens nobody else can see. Human beings are sort of wired that way. I don't know why, but we, when we alone, and when we are, you know, not in in the view of other people we become evil and wicked for some reason. I guess, in Freudian terms, the dinosaur brain kind of emerges from the base of the spine and takes over, but only when we are alone, when we are out. There again, in Freudian terms, is the super ego which keeps control over everything else. So also in the hole in the wall, my computers were publicly visible, the screens were large and the children were in mixed, heterogeneous groups of boys and girls. Nothing ever went wrong.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting. Another thing that struck me from your research was that you found that the farther away from urban centers your research team went and looked at I think I don't want to misspeak, but I think, if I recall correctly, it was looking at the quality of schools and the quality of the educators and somehow the prestige. I can't remember how that was measured, but at the farther away from urban centers you traveled, the lower the prestige was, the less teachers wanted to work there and perhaps the teachers were less well prepared at the university level, something along those lines. Yeah, was that? Is that a general capturing of that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we've got it pretty much there. What I found was that the further you go from an urban center and I'm talking about India now an urban center with good schools and hospitals and movie theaters and all of that that we have in cities and further, further away we go, the good teachers don't want to go there, for a very obvious reason because a good teacher also wants a good standard of living. So they don't want to go into the back of beyond, from where they cannot actually access all the facilities of the city. So so they try to move closer to the city, and who succeeds, the better teachers succeed. As a result, the standardized test scores go up, and closer you get to a big city. Now, this is not true necessarily of the developed world, Because if you take, for example, the United States, there are places which are remote, but they have everything. So so it's not as though a good teacher wouldn't go there.
Speaker 1:However, in general, for humanity, the migration towards the city dominates our entire psyche, which is why you have these huge places like San Diego and Los Angeles and San Francisco. And so why do? Why are they so big? Why are they so crowded? Why do people go there when they know that it's going to be difficult. And why don't they stay, you know, 300 miles away in the country? Well, a few do, but most people would say it's kind of very convenient in the end to be in the city. So this migration towards the city causes a change in the standardized testing results.
Speaker 1:In England the same was change of results was found, but in a different context. In those places where we had a high proportion of poor people. We found that good teachers don't want to work there. Why? Because there could be a problem with drugs. They can be a problem with crime. Teachers also have young children and a family to support. So they say, yeah, I love children, but the thing is I don't want to put my own children in danger all the time. So I'd like to move away from those places. And once again you find that the standardized test scores of the people who most need that education is the worst.
Speaker 2:And do you see that self organized learning environments and access to the internet? Certainly since the hole in the wall, the experiment, etc. There's been? You know, the internet is now so ubiquitous and smartphones and everything. Has that mitigated some of that difference, or are those divisions as stark as ever?
Speaker 1:Well, it's an interesting question. It definitely has. I mean, the presence of the internet has definitely levered the playing field a lot more than it did before. How do I support that? Look at the kind of people that the high tech industries hire Google or Microsoft or something. They don't look at. What was your test score in English literature? They ask you different kinds of questions. One of my favorite questions is you know, a mirror flips things from right to left. We all know that that's lateral inversion. Why doesn't it flip top to bottom? And they give you a phone and say sure, use the internet. I mean use whatever you want, but I'll give you 15 minutes, give me an answer. Well, you know what? The guys from the cookie cutter, big public schools and so on, or big private schools. They can't answer that question. The guys who can answer the question are the street smart Google searching, talking to each other kids, the guys who sit at the back of the class, the C graders. They are the ones who answer the questions and they are the ones that are getting hired.
Speaker 1:Now, the good kids are watching this and they know that they need to pick up skills that their schools are no longer able to give them. However, there is also the old industry. We still do have the automobile industry and the bicycle industry and etc. We're in a kind of a transition period between these two ages the old industrial age, the new information age. So where do the good kids go? Well, politics. They could go into corporate management, because those are areas still following the norms of the empire.
Speaker 1:I don't want to go very much further into this because I know people are going to criticize me for criticizing a system that ought to be criticized, so I won't go into that. But you know civil servants, for example. You don't get a street smart Google searching kid becoming a great civil servant. Who becomes a great civil servant? The toppers from the expensive private schools of England, of United States, of Europe, of whatever. How come they become the civil servants and not these other guys? Because the civil servant has to have sufficient grasp of language to be able to lie with distinction. We all know that. We all watch TV, we all know that, but we are unable to do anything about it. Okay, who goes into Wall Street today? Not your private school toppers, it's the street smart, as you are getting into Wall Street, because the Wall Street or any share market is a typical example of a self-organizing system where millions of stockbrokers, barely educated stockbrokers, millions of their views gives us the valuation of our biggest companies. It's an amazing system. It's a hive Okay. And there are people inside that who are not from the. So we have this world which is polarized into the places where the C grade Google searches are the kings and the places where the private education logical, cool English literature type of character. That polarization will end. I can see that it's days are numbered, actually, and you'll have to spread into a situation where self-organized learning will be a prerequisite for the future. It's a prerequisite for you being able to survive in any job. It's a quick last example.
Speaker 1:Take this AI thing that happened last year with chat GPT. You know everybody got really scared. Oh, ai is going to take over the whole world. It's going to do this, do that. They remembered all their sci-fi, horror films and so on. I discovered that almost nobody knew how these things work. They could only see the output. So I would ask people you know so chat GPT said this, but do you know how it works? What is a pre-trained transformer? How does it so on my little computer at home here I have a Dell laptop computer. I did something really absurd. I built one. Remember I am a 1970s programmer.
Speaker 2:Machine language ones and zeros.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I built one, and of course it couldn't do anything much because you need a much bigger computer to do it with, but it could babble. But in the process I could understand how it worked. It was an amazing understanding. It's an understanding that will be mind-boggling that's another hour for you one day. However, there are civil servants trying to figure out what to do with AI. It's such a hilarious situation. As far as I'm concerned, we must regulate AI. But what is AI? Well, you know artificial intelligence and what is that? I mean, how does it? How come it says things to you in answer to questions? Well, you see, and then they stop. It reminds me of early on in this discussion when we said when you ask somebody, what does really no mean, what does really no mean, and nobody knows. It's the same thing with the AI style technologies. So why am I mentioning AI? Ai and controlling AI is the final blow to the old system and I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:I actually think that, from my limited experience and I'm certainly not a computer programmer but I actually think that certainly the emergence of chat GPT, which is just one narrow area, and some other related platforms are going to give us the opportunity to become more human if we think about them the right way. A concrete example is you know, recently I didn't do it with your interview questions, but sometimes I'll ask chat GPT hey, I've got this podcast guest coming up and you know I've got a busy schedule, I have a day job. And so, hey, chat GPT generate 10 podcast interview questions for so and so, and now it's being able. Now it's able to surf the internet If you buy it, if you buy up to a more robust version, etc. And out of 10 questions there might be one that I could in good faith ask another human being that was nuanced enough to have a real conversation. The others are so basic level, just factual, that okay, and sometimes the fact that the facts that they're after aren't even related to the subject. Now, maybe over time, over maybe over time, that some of that gets gets improved, but what it's allowing me to do is really remind myself of the human value right, this conversation that you and I are having, even though we're not in in person, face to face, but it's a deeply human experience, this interaction that we're having, and the questions that you and I were able to iterate on prior to today's interview. They're human questions and they were. You know, we try to make this as nuanced a conversation as possible.
Speaker 2:I think once we let go of this need to control and, as you say, you know this oh, we need to put guidelines around AI. I think in the beginning in New York City schools which has a million students in it, or something they came out with this statement early on AI is banned in our schools. And I just started. That only lasted like a month because people knew that was crazy. I was chuckling because you've got you've got a million students with these. So, like, how are you?
Speaker 2:you know reflection for me as a, as a lifelong educator and as a father of a college age daughter, right, who we have these conversations about. You know she writes long essays in college and she's in the humanities and and I ask her hey, how are you using AI and what has your college said about it? And they haven't really said anything.
Speaker 1:You know we're an interesting space.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, absolutely so. Ai you know I'm not worried about AI at all. All that I'm suggesting is that things like AI and the internet should be a part of curriculum, right for children. We all talk about the internet, but if you ask someone, you know like we are having this conversation over zoom. If I were to ask someone, how does it work when I speak? What exactly happens? Now that fellow, whoever I ask, he may know everything about how a automobile engine works or how a steam engine works, but it doesn't know how the internet works, although we live with the internet 24 by seven. It's the same with AI. We can be afraid of AI, but we don't know how it works.
Speaker 1:If we put this into into the school curriculum from now, then we would be doing the right thing by our children. How to put those things into the curriculum? Well, I wrote another article about that quite recently. It's called the internet as a subject in schools. And how would you teach that? Because obviously you won't find a teacher, you won't find a textbook. Only the internet can teach you about the internet. How would you examine a student about this subject called the internet? Only the internet can examine you about the internet. So you know that kind and if you apply the same thing to AI, who can tell you about AI? Ai can tell you about AI. Who can examine if your knowledge of AI is correct? Only an.
Speaker 2:AI can. You've been extremely generous with your time and I have just a couple more questions before we wrap up today's conversation. It's been such a pleasure to hear your stories and I've really respected and admired your work and your courage, because you're taking on some pretty established ideas, and sometimes organizations and industries, in your thinking. How can educators learn more about the concept of S-O-L-E soul? Are there trainings available or is it kind of folks need to just do their own research? How could I better direct our teachers and our staff towards these concepts?
Speaker 1:There's a website called startsoulorg. It's run by a friend of mine, dr Jeff McClellan, out of Ohio, and it's an excellent resource which not only tells you what a soul is, which is very simple actually, and but it also allows you if you want to actually use a soul in your classroom. It gives you the tools with which to do it, you know, to actually make it easier for you to run that. So that's one place. The other, without sounding like a salesman, is if you read my book, the School in the Cloud, that has a description of what exactly souls are. And well, to make fun of myself, if you want to really know what a soul is, you read my book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll definitely include those resources as well in the show notes for this show. I did have a question before we wrap up, because it seems like it's this ever-present specter. Sometimes we're in denial about it. What was the impact of COVID, do you believe, on learning worldwide in terms of? Well, we all know that there's talk of the learning gaps that came out of COVID, but, more importantly, did COVID actually provide a kind of almost like a perverse opportunity to force folks more into this online environment, and did that have a positive impact on people naturally organizing themselves into this minimally invasive space? In other words, schools will close right All around the world. Do you think, as humanity, we took positive advantage of that, organically or not?
Speaker 1:Well, actually COVID is a good example of how, whether we wanted it or not, change happens. What COVID did before I come to what it did for education, look at what it did to life. I mean, this way of talking. What we are doing right now was considered a curiosity before COVID was considered what in England would be called dodgy. It sometimes works, it's entirely used to it right now. Covid brought WhatsApp into mainstream, where you can barely live without it.
Speaker 1:What did COVID do? Covid changed the whole idea of shopping completely, of sitting at home and ordering. We don't need to do it right now, but we all do all the time. It's made Amazon very rich, and perhaps they deserve to be rich because they provide the service that COVID encouraged. What else did COVID do? Look at what happened to food. You can get food at any time of day or night. You can get food from anywhere. Anything that you want to eat Brought right up to your door in minutes. Covid did that.
Speaker 1:What about education? Well, schools closed. Teachers were forced finally into internet. A few of them even admitted it sheepishly to me, saying you know we had to turn to. I thought to myself should was Sugata right when he talked about the internet. Another teacher wrote a very cute mail to me and said you know, the hole in the wall used to be a curiosity, but because of COVID, now every home has one. So that's what COVID did for education.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, what did the teachers try to do? They made a huge mistake. They tried to use the internet to recreate the classroom. You know it's. It was an absurd thing to do. It was like taking a Tesla electric car and then attaching two horses in the front and then trying to make it behave like a horse and cart and then saying oh, they used to do it much better before. Just look at this. This is a hopeless car, you know, the horses can barely pull it. That kind of thing. That's what happened. The classrooms didn't work and now you can see there's plethora of articles everywhere saying the children have lost two years of their lives and wonderful things that they could have learned, that they didn't do because they were sitting at home, etc. Not paying any attention. And you know they were alienated from each other because of all of that.
Speaker 1:And I haven't had anybody ask the question do you think it would have been similar if there was a colony on Mars with children in it, and should we not prepare for that? Why were children's education damaged? Because we were building a horse and cart with an electric car? If we had a different kind, if we were to do self-organized learning environments instead of pretending that we are creating a classroom, if we could just ask the child a question and say ask your mom, ask your dad, look up the internet, tell me the answer, tomorrow we would have had a much better result. I feel, however, it's important that we don't look back at COVID and say it hurt education. It did not. It moved us. We were moving anyway, but it moved us. It gave us a kick in the pants into the internet. We dived into the cloud and we're still, kind of, you know, trying to find a foothold inside it, but we are there.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting, as you described, that Tesla with two horses tethered to it that those forces outside of the schoolhouse, politics funding, state funding, etc. In our case in California, as administrators, we were asked immediately to justify exactly how much time students were quote unquote engaged in learning, in Zoom calls and other online platforms, and we literally had to try to quantify it. So we take that data and give it to the state to justify the millions of dollars we receive to be able to keep our operations running. And so, as you described that, yeah, what we were doing is trying to force a 19th century model into a 21st or 22nd century technological environment.
Speaker 2:And as soon as COVID diminished, everybody rushed back into the face-to-face because they were yearning for oh, I just want to get back to being quote unquote a teacher.
Speaker 2:Now we're back in the classroom, but what's happened is it's very interesting we've had in the United States and in California, particular massive increases in chronic absenteeism, for example, of students, to where we used to have single-digit rates of students who were chronically absent and the state as a whole, which is five or six million students, was at 35% chronically absent. So over a third of students were missing 10% or more of their instructional time, because instructional time being defined as being there in person, and it's almost like the tendons got stretched during COVID right the threads that bound people physically to the classroom and to the schoolhouse got stretched and then everyone was yearning to come back in person, but many families were like this. Just it doesn't have meaning for me anymore, and so it's an interesting place where we sit, and I hope that ideas like yours continue to live and propagate in this space, because we need a different model. I think the children are speaking. They're voting with their feet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, which is the reason why I'm so happy that I'm speaking to you in California, and if there are educators in California who have listened to all of this for the last one hour, to them I would say show us one more time in California, show us again.
Speaker 2:I think that's a perfect place to end the questions for today. I had one more surprised question that's not on the list. I asked this of all the guests. So you have the opportunity to design a billboard that will contain your message to the world about the way you view education, the way you view life in general.
Speaker 1:What does your?
Speaker 1:billboard say While I was listening to your question, an image came into my mind, the image of what they call a British public school, or what you guys would call a private school, I guess, with this big arched entrance and on the arch is the school motto. And remember, in the mid-20th century those mottoes used to be in Latin most of the time. I've never understood any of them A cock-hack or something like that. I was thinking of that image. I was thinking of a doorway like that to a school of the 21st century and the motto on the arch would say figure it out.
Speaker 2:I'm going to keep an eye out for that in Northern California. I know you're going to be there soon, so we'll see if you actually get to have your billboard. That's a perfect apropos. Stop for today's conversation and again, professor Mitra, I really want to sincerely thank you. Today has been an absolute pleasure for me and it's been an honor getting a chance to know you digitally and, having watched your TED Talks and read some of your research and your books, it's been an absolute pleasure and you've made my day in my week, so I wanted to thank you Well, thank you, david, equally pleasurable for me and, as I said over and over again, thank you California.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacchial for editing and production assistance and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day.