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Web-Surfing Indian Slum Kids Ask: "What's a Computer"
chaoticset writes "An experiment in minimally directed self-learning has been going fairly well, from the article: To test his ideas, Sugata Mitra launched something 13 months ago he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it...he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net." Update: 04/17 22:23 GMT by M : Mitra has a website about his experiments.
From the article:
Minimally Invasive Education (MIE) is a pedagogic method and derives its name partly from the medical term minimally invasive surgery. MIE believes that in the absence of any directed input, any learning environment that provides adequate level of curiosity can cause learning.
This is not a new theory, ./'ers. People have been teaching themselves all along - indeed, our school system is the newcomer to the scene. Read, oh, "A People's History of the United States"... but I'm drifting off my topic...
An education system such as this already exists in the States. It's called "unschooling". Give the child materials to learn with, help learning when they need it, and said child will actually teach themselves.
Children are supposedly "lazy" and "not wanting to learn" because they've been forced into it by repetitive cookie-cutter education. This study just gives an old technique a new and more politically-correct name - "unschooling" pisses off the NEA.
That was my