We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
Sugata MitraRead
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?
Interpretation
The quote critiques traditional educational practices that emphasize rote memorization over practical skills.
Sugata Mitra questions the relevance of teaching certain knowledge, like multiplication tables, that may not serve a real purpose in the modern job market. By citing the example of reciting the 17 times table in a job interview, he highlights how educational systems often focus on memorization instead of fostering critical thinking and applicable skills that employers truly value.
In practice
In a lecture about modern education methods, you could use this quote to highlight the need for a curriculum focused on practical skills.
We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
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.
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.
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.
If children have interest, then Education happens
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.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know β the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to beβ¦. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
It is easier to exemplify values than teach them.
We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.
I want to venture out into music education for kids. As a child, I was discouraged by a lack of money, and now I want to use my platform to give back to kids without resources.
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