3rd Ted Talk

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

A summary

            Sugata Mita claims that the teacher- driven education, which teacher lead class by just giving information to children, causes many troubles and children are able to learn through the way they like without teacher’s intervention. First, he introduces his experiments that show how children acquire knowledge or information without instructor’s directions. The first experiment was done by New Delhi in India and this experiment. In this experiment, even though the children who have no knowledge about computer or could not read english could manipulate computers and use as they want ,such as recording thier voice with computer, without any intrervention, they failed to understand academic subjects such as “biotechnology” . Sugata Mita interprets this results that children did not put on efforts to understnding the subject and enjoy it all the time. On the other hands, in the second experiment done by children in Gateahead School, in Italy, many children generated accurate answers about 6 questions that are related academic subjects within twenty minutes to forty five minutes though discussing each other and accessing to the internet and remember it for a long time. However, these successful results are tuned out only by students who worked with groups and single student who work alone didn’t generate results they want. Finally, he maintains that education is self organising system that is emergent event and a self a self organizing system is educating people without teachers’ intervention

(word=209)

A Response

                 Even though I agree with his idea that  the teaching method that teacher allow children to learn as they want not only makes children get  more involve in learning process and boost the effects of studying, his two experiments allow me discover several interesting things for the following. First, to be effective the child-driven education, children need to have motivation about learning some subjects. The reason while India children didn't succeed in understanding academic subjects, Italian children did is how much they have motivation to learn is different. India children had curiosity about computers as a new toy or new way to play, but they were interested in some academic subjects. Therefore, the child-driven education can generate good results only if learners want to learn and have curiosity about some subjects.  On the top of that, It is also interesting results that in the experiment in Italy, only students in group successes in getting proper answers. I believe that competition and discussion is also important factor of the child-driven education. Children probably feel strong motivation when they feel they compete with other group, and can focus on generating results.

(Word=189)

 http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html