Do we still need teachers? According to Sugata Mitra – not really.
During TEDtalks Director Sugata Mitra had a really interesting presentation regarding ‘New experiments in self-teaching’
Sugata installed several computer (with internet connection) in very poor areas all over the world and kids were able to use those computers on their own. After few months he was checking the improvement – and it worked! kids learned so much.
…so the internet is not that bad after all. Kids, even left alone with computers/internet, might learn a lot. Isn’t that a big opportunity for kids living in a very poor areas where not many teachers can get, nor kids have computers at home.
Speculation: Education is a self organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon…
I remember that Bill Gates mentioned something (maybe that was in 2010) about self-learning, that nowadays there is easy access to the knowledge which is storage on-line that we don’t really need schools (organizations) to study there. Within next 10-15 years it will be more important to get the knowledge and not to which school we are attending. I guess some schools (e.g. London School of Economics, Oxford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, etc.) will last and many many more….but we will probably learn more on-line than ever before.
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check the TEDtalk – Sugata Mitra
