Xanthippa's Chamberpot

The best way to make this world a better place for everyone, in my never-humble-opinion, is to make good education so accessible, everyone gets some.

The more, the better.  Why?

It may be naive on my part, but I have always thought that many injustices throughout the world are not opposed because it simply does not occur to people that they could be opposed.  One good thing that results from education is the broadening of one’s perspectives, learning about different places where things are done differently, and the realization that it is possible to ‘question stuff’…

Education also teaches us how to reason.  It does not matter what we are learning, we cannot escape acquiring some formal reasoning when we ‘learn stuff’.  That is also good.

But, perhaps one of the best reasons for making education available to everyone is that it will open horizons for kids and open up possibilities for them that they never dreamt of before.

That is why I think that efforts like ‘One Laptop per Child’ are so important – and why every child, male or female, should become educated.

But many people question how children would benefit from simply having an internet-connected laptop.  What would they do with one?  How would they learn?  Many of them do not even speak English – or any of the other languages dominating the internet!  What use would such a computer be to them?

A little while ago, one of my sons came across an interesting article about a brilliant study done by a physicist named Sugata Mitra in New Delhi, India.  It was called ‘Hole in the Wall’:

An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues of digital divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.

The results were brilliant!  The computer, connected to high-speed internet, had a touch-screen interface.  It ‘mysteriously’ appeared, cemented into a wall, in a New Delhi slum… no instructions, no manual, no rules, no help.  What happened next was, well, enlightening!

What 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. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

If you have the time to read the whole interview with Dr. Mitra, I would greatly suggest it.  If not, here are some of the highlights:

• Children aged 6-12 were the most avid users of the computer
• without any instruction, they taught themselves to use a paint program and to access sites with games
• Dr. Mitra played an mp3 file for them – a capability of the computer that had not occurred to them.  In several days, Dr. Mitra says, they knew enough about mp3 files and music online ‘he could have learned a thing or two from them’.
• If children think something is worth learning, it is not necessary to use formal instruction (expensive in the developing countries) to teach kids – instead, it ought to build on knowledge kids can self-teach

But there was more to Dr. Mitra’s curiosity…he wondered how effective self-directed learning would be in more formal subjects…like, say, physics…

Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, “What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?” He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, “Look here guys. I have a little problem for you.” They read the questions and said they didn’t understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, “Here’s a terminal. I’ll give you two hours to find the answers.”

Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.

They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn’t mean much. But I said to him, “Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject.” So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, “They don’t know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn’t know.”

That’s not a wow for the children, it’s a wow for the Internet. It shows you what it’s capable of. The slum children don’t have physics teachers. But if I could make them curious enough, then all the content they need is out there. The greatest expert on earth on viscosity probably has his papers up there on the Web somewhere. Creating content is not what’s important. What is important is infrastructure and access … The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.

This makes so much sense!

And, please, consider that many universities and colleges have started putting their undergraduate courses online – accessible for free!!!

Here are some examples:  MIT Open Courseware, Carnegie Mellon open learning initiative, John Hopkins open courseware, and many, many more!!!  So, with a laptop, an internet connection and a healthy dose of curiosity and desire, a kid in Africa or Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the world can access world-class education.  There is still the question of accreditation, but that is only necessary to getting a job – not to actually using the education on their own! 

Just think how empowering it would be for young people, all over the world, to gain access to this kind of education!  If Dr. Mitra is correct, then self-directed learning is the most effective way to educate our children.  So, let us put the tools into their hands – and let’s watch them grow!

Of course, education is not the answer to ending oppression – but it is an important step.  It is much more difficult to oppress a society of people who are well educated and internet literate than it is to control people who don’t know how to call out for help!