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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
EducationLearningSkillsCritical ThinkingJob Market
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about modern education methods, you could use this quote to highlight the need for a curriculum focused on practical skills.
More from Sugata Mitra
All quotes →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.
Sugata MitraRead
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.
Sugata MitraRead
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.
Sugata MitraRead
If children have interest, then Education happens
Sugata MitraRead
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.
Sugata MitraRead
Similar quotes
Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.
Zadie SmithRead
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.
Ken RobinsonRead
At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.
Booker T. WashingtonRead
Mastering the art of asking questions is essential to creativity and innovation. A More Beautiful Question should be standard reading for all aspiring design thinkers as well an inspiration to those searching for a life of curiosity and meaning.
Tim BrownRead
The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.
Bronislaw MalinowskiRead
We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
Walter Dean MyersRead