WEBVTT

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The last time I stood

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on a TED main stage

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was in February, 2013.

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It was in Long Beach, California.

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TED gave me their prize
at that point in time,

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a million dollars.

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I thought they would put it
in my bank account,

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but they didn't, actually.

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(Laughter)

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They gave it to the university.

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But anyhow, here I am again
on a TED main stage.

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I spent the million dollars.

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(Laughter)

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I'll tell you what happened next.

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I thought I'll give you a report

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on what I did with the money,
and where we are at this point in time.

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It's not all gone;
there's just a little bit left.

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(Laughter)

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When TED gave me the prize, they also gave
another prize, a smaller one,

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to Sundance Institute to make
a documentary on the whole project.

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The documentary will be called
"The School in the Cloud."

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At the moment,
the documentary is not finished,

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but I got hold of a trailer

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and I thought
you might enjoy watching that.

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(Video) Sugata Mitra:
What is the future of learning?

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Could it be that we are heading
towards or maybe in a future

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when knowing is obsolete?

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Could it be that we don't need
to go to school at all?

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Could it be that at the point in time
when you need to know something,

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you can find it out in two minutes?

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[In 2013, Sugata Mitra asked TED

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to help him discover
the future of learning.]

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My wish is to build a facility

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where children go on
these intellectual adventures

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driven by the big questions
which their mediators put in.

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It's a facility
which is practically unmanned;

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it will be called the School in the Cloud.

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Woman: (Hindi) We really want him
to become an educated person,

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but it's difficult
because of the state of the school.

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[Former primary school, Korakati]

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Good teachers don’t go to remote places.

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The remoter you get,
the worse primary education becomes.

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[Sugata has chosen sites
for the project in rural India...

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...and in northeast England.]

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I don't know how to build
a "School in the Cloud"

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because I have never built one.

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So, I'm trying to figure out a design

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which, really speaking, belongs
to children and is run by children.

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So, that's what's going on;
it's a great big experiment.

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Schools as we know them now are outdated.

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Teacher: As soon as I started doing it

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and seeing the buzz
and the enjoyment of the kids,

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it made me look at my lessons differently,
and the role of a teacher differently.

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Less talking at the front
and more handing it over to the children.

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Girl: I really like it
because it's independent,

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and you get to work with your friends.

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SM: Korakati may or may not be different
from the schools of England,

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but that's what we are going to look for.

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The idea is to have
a complete glass front

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to a building here

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and a large screen for a full size

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Skyped-in mediator.

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Boy: Teachers will teach us from London
using the Internet.

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Woman: All I ever really wanted
to know about computers

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was how to turn them off.

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Hi!

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Hello Raveen. Hello [unclear].

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How nice to see you.

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Look what I made.

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Can you see what this is?
Whoo!

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(Laughter)

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Boy: English is spoken everywhere.

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If I learn it from childhood,
then when I grow up

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Woman: You help a child to the point

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where if he wants to know something

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he knows where to look for it,
and how to look for it.

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SM: More affluent children have people
who will help them to learn anyway.

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But it's children in desolate areas

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who really desperately need
to know how to learn,

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and I know that the Internet does that.

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Learning itself is actually
an emergent phenomenon

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like a hive or a thunderstorm.

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It's not about making learning happen;
it's about letting it happen.

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[School in the cloud]

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(Applause)

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I made a project.

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I made a project for TED.

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The way it works is that they tell you
what to do with the money if you get it.

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So I made out a project.

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The project was that I would build
seven laboratories.

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Seven learning laboratories.

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Five of them would be in India,
and two would be in England.

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What sort of labs?

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Well, for that, you need to know
what happened before

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which I won't go over,

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but what happened in the 15 years
before the TED prize

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was that I was able to figure out
something which all of you know

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and all of you figure out
for yourselves in 2 minutes.

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Which is that if you have a question

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you no longer need to ask
a human being for an answer.

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There is something out there
which can tell you what the answer is.

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What is it out there?

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The Internet of course,
we call it the Cloud.

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To me it's the first non human,

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conscious and intelligent entity

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that we have encountered.

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We always thought that aliens
will land from other planets

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and they will be green with long legs
and round eyes.

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It turned out
it was not going to be like that.

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The alien entity is made up
of four billion people,

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but it is not a person, it's a thing.

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You can ask that thing anything,
and it tells you what you want to know.

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Given that situation,
what happens to children and education?

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There are reports
from all around the world

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that children are not asking
questions to people.

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Or at least if they have to ask
a question to a person,

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they do that after they've asked
their phones.

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Children don't want to learn
how to multiply, divide, add and subtract.

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Because they say they already know
how to do that.

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It's done with phones.

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Children don't want
particularly to learn to read

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because they say there are things
that can read out things to them,

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even if they don't know how to read.

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At the moment,
they don't like to write by hand

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because they want to know

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why they should learn
how to write by hand.

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Will they ever do it
in the rest of their lives?

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So, what happens in a world
where reading, writing and arithmetic

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are treated in such a cavalier manner?

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I wanted to experiment with that world.

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The idea was to create facilities
for children, which have the Internet,

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and the children can go in
and do what they like

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without any supervision,
or without any teachers.

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We could have presence there

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but it would come out of the Internet
over Skype, from somewhere,

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if the children wanted to.

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I work with children in the age group
of about 8 to 13 years old.

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They love speaking to adults over Skype,

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particularly adults who are retired
school teachers and people like that.

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I asked them,

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"Why do you like this so much?
Do you like it?"

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"Yes, we love it."

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"Why do you like this so much?"

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They said, "You know what?
We can switch them off."

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(Laughter)

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What I did after February, 2013

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was to first look for places,
and then start building.

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The seven labs are built to cover
from the really remote areas,

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such as areas

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without electricity, without healthcare,
without schooling,

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nothing really, just the wild,

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through to middle class England

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and all the ones in between.

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So, the seven have all been built now;

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I finished opening the last one
just this month.

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The very first one

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was opened in November, 2013

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the same year that I got the prize.

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You see over there, a picture of that lab.

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It's in a town called
Killingworth, England.

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It's actually situated inside a school.

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The school is called
George Stephenson High School.

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It's very close
to George Stephenson's home,

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you know the guy who built
the first working steam engine.

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In Killingworth

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- this is a room -

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it just looks like a nice lounge
with computers and an Xbox.

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The teachers when I built it said,

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"Sugata, this is a bit too much.

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Do you have any idea of what
they're going to do with that Xbox?

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They are going to do nothing else,
except play with the Xbox."

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So I said,
"That's our challenge, isn't it?"

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If you have gone in there
to teach geography

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and students are playing with the Xbox,

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it means geography
is more boring than the Xbox.

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Then, we should really look at geography
and chuck it from the curriculum

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or put it into the Xbox somehow.

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You can't tell the children:
"We will take away your Xbox

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and put you into school
to do other things."

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That's not the right way to engage
children's attention.

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So here is a picture
of what happens in there.

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As you can see
there are five children in the corner

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researching something or the other,

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and there is one on the Xbox.

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If you give them something
interesting enough to do,

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they don't, actually
play Xbox all the time;

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it was our misconception.

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Here is more of Killingworth.

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What they do in there is called
the self-organized learning environment.

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It's very simple, take five computers
and take twenty children.

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Put them in there; ask them a question.

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The question has to be an interesting one,

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what we call a "Big Question."

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What's a big question?

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It can be all kinds,
but let me give you an example:

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A big question could be,
"Can trees think?"

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If you give that question to children,
they first will mutter with each other,

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"Trees, they can't."
"Maybe they can." "I don't know."

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Then you just leave them alone
and you say,

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“I don’t know the answer either,
but why don't we look for it? "

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And this will happen,
what you see on the screen.

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About 30 or 40 minutes later
they will come back to you,

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not with childish observations;

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they will come back
with the nature of thought,

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with the latest advances in biology, etc.

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That's called the self-organized
learning environment.

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Here is one that we did
in Kalkaji, New Delhi.

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It has on the wall a Skyped-in mediator
as you can see, and it's a girls school.

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The girls couldn't speak
any English, to start with.

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We opened it in February, 2014.

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I put in a team of observers

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to measure their
beginning levels of English,

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which was close to zero, and then I said,

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"We will measure every two months or so."

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After about three days,

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I was talking to this mediator
that you see on the screen, over Skype,

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I was asking,
"How is it going there?"

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She said, "Very nice.
Those girls are really nice.

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One of them said to me,
'When are you coming next?' "

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I said, "In what language
did she say that?"

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The mediator said, "In English."

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When I sent my research team in
after a month to measure the level,

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she reported that was too late;
it's done already.

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I've never seen anything
happen so quickly,

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so I went to Delhi to ask the girls.

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I said, "How did you do that so fast?"

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They gave me an answer
which was quite astonishing.

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They said, "You know that woman
who comes on the TV screen?

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She doesn't understand
anything other than English."

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(Laughter)

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It's as simple as that.

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This is a little town called
Newton Aycliffe in England.

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If you remember the map,
it's in Northeast.

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This school is called Greenfields,

00:14:44.540 --> 00:14:47.625
and we have a School in the Cloud there.

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What they have done is
they made one of their walls glass.

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On the other side, is a typical
English green country side.

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Inside they put in astro turf,
so when you enter the room

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suddenly you feel as though
you are outside

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because of the turf merging in.

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They put park benches, gas lamps,
and things like that

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and a few computers scattered in there.

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So, the children come into the room,
and when you leave them alone -

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when you do self-organized
learning environment,

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you, the teachers,
don't stay there; you go out -

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so, you start the session, and you go out,

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and from the other side
which is also glass you can observe them.

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Once, very recently in Greenfields,

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a group of 8 year olds were sent
into the room by their teacher,

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the teacher said -
we often do this in SOLEs -

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we say to the children,

00:15:54.510 --> 00:15:56.840
"For the next 45 minutes,

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I can't talk to you,
you can't talk to me."

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There is no communication.

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You are on your own,
and there is the big question.

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So, she did that.

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These 8 year olds were doing things.

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After a while - remember what she said?

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"You can't talk to me,
and I can't talk to you."

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After a little while one of them
came up to the glass window,

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he had a piece of paper in his hand,
and he held it up, on it were the words

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"Help! We are stuck."

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(Laughter)

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She didn't say,
"You can't communicate with me,"

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she said, "You can't talk to me."

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I thought that was clever thinking.

00:16:43.503 --> 00:16:45.943
Here is another view of Greenfields.

00:16:47.635 --> 00:16:48.819
Another one.

00:16:50.065 --> 00:16:52.152
Chandrakona in Bengal,

00:16:53.682 --> 00:16:55.792
it's a pretty remote area.

00:16:57.252 --> 00:17:00.409
If you can think of the map of India

00:17:00.812 --> 00:17:05.657
think of the eastern side,
the side close to Burma and Thailand.

00:17:07.842 --> 00:17:10.002
This is somewhere there.

00:17:11.739 --> 00:17:14.645
In Chandrakona we have this structure

00:17:16.405 --> 00:17:18.495
and we built a School in the Cloud.

00:17:19.405 --> 00:17:23.515
The parents came there;
they are all farmers and they said,

00:17:23.925 --> 00:17:25.855
"What are we supposed to do here?"

00:17:25.855 --> 00:17:28.595
I said, "You are supposed
to send your children here."

00:17:28.595 --> 00:17:30.156
They said, "What for?"

00:17:30.885 --> 00:17:33.771
I said, "They learn things here."

00:17:34.505 --> 00:17:38.221
They pointed to the computers and said,
"From those TV screens?"

00:17:38.405 --> 00:17:41.275
I said, "They are not TVs,
they are computers".

00:17:41.625 --> 00:17:44.175
And they said,
"Well, isn't that the same thing?"

00:17:44.175 --> 00:17:46.025
I said, "No, not quite"

00:17:46.845 --> 00:17:50.054
They said, "Who will teach them?"

00:17:50.735 --> 00:17:53.425
I said, "They will teach themselves".

00:17:53.945 --> 00:17:57.545
"How can they?"
I said, "They will use the Internet."

00:17:58.205 --> 00:18:00.145
"What's the Internet?"

00:18:01.955 --> 00:18:03.933
Where do you go from there?

00:18:06.458 --> 00:18:08.888
This is what it looks like inside.

00:18:09.256 --> 00:18:12.716
If you can see it,
you will see it at the far end

00:18:14.556 --> 00:18:18.355
an Australian gentleman
who talks to the children.

00:18:19.676 --> 00:18:22.645
I hate to think
what will happen to their accents,

00:18:22.935 --> 00:18:25.055
but otherwise they love him.

00:18:25.055 --> 00:18:26.585
(Laughter)

00:18:27.454 --> 00:18:30.429
In Chandrakona, three months later

00:18:31.988 --> 00:18:35.188
there's a tall, slim, young girl there.

00:18:39.783 --> 00:18:43.043
I have visited the place and she said,
"We really love this place."

00:18:43.251 --> 00:18:44.811
I said, "For what?"

00:18:45.805 --> 00:18:48.535
She said, "You can find out
all sorts of things here."

00:18:49.465 --> 00:18:52.325
I said, "Like what?
What are you finding out today?"

00:18:52.325 --> 00:18:56.534
She said, "We were taught in school
that plants are green

00:18:58.715 --> 00:19:00.825
because they have chlorophyll.

00:19:00.825 --> 00:19:05.186
And they have chlorophyll
to process light in order to make energy.

00:19:07.356 --> 00:19:09.656
I've come here to find out

00:19:09.656 --> 00:19:14.510
why chlorophyll has to be green
and not blue, yellow or red.

00:19:16.996 --> 00:19:18.421
Do you know?"

00:19:18.746 --> 00:19:23.226
I said, "No, I have no idea
why it has to be green."

00:19:24.186 --> 00:19:26.656
She said, "Ok, we will figure it out."

00:19:28.750 --> 00:19:29.863
Three months.

00:19:31.614 --> 00:19:33.714
That's a view of the inside again.

00:19:34.771 --> 00:19:39.504
Here is our most remote area;
it's called Korakati, also Eastern India;

00:19:39.995 --> 00:19:42.229
it's where the Ganges meets the sea.

00:19:43.719 --> 00:19:45.227
It has nothing there;

00:19:45.227 --> 00:19:47.987
there's no electricity,
no healthcare, no schools.

00:19:48.667 --> 00:19:51.447
I won’t say nothing -
they have Bengal tigers,

00:19:52.087 --> 00:19:53.467
(Laughter)

00:19:53.947 --> 00:19:57.987
and hooded cobras and lots of children.

00:20:00.467 --> 00:20:03.274
It took some building,
but I built that one.

00:20:03.577 --> 00:20:07.543
It's solar powered, it has a tower
which is 45 ft high.

00:20:09.251 --> 00:20:10.911
I couldn't get the Internet,

00:20:10.911 --> 00:20:14.407
I had a receiver and kept raising it
on bamboo poles,

00:20:14.407 --> 00:20:19.240
at 45 ft above ground,
we now got 8 megabits per second 3G.

00:20:22.497 --> 00:20:26.245
3G met the stone age in there.

00:20:29.742 --> 00:20:32.892
In Chandrakona,
the sessions are intermittent

00:20:32.892 --> 00:20:35.232
because of all sort of problems.

00:20:36.971 --> 00:20:40.214
The cables run on the ground,

00:20:40.751 --> 00:20:44.421
the Internet cables that connect
all the computers together.

00:20:44.421 --> 00:20:47.831
If you have seen those cables,
they are kind of cream colored.

00:20:49.507 --> 00:20:54.460
I had to remove them
and lift them up, somewhere,

00:20:55.247 --> 00:20:59.551
because there is a very pale, thin snake

00:21:00.327 --> 00:21:05.909
which can change its color to the color
of the Internet cable and sleeps there.

00:21:08.260 --> 00:21:10.040
A bit of a strange problem,

00:21:10.040 --> 00:21:12.790
you don't get these problems
in schools usually.

00:21:12.790 --> 00:21:14.160
(Laughter)

00:21:16.478 --> 00:21:18.818
The Internet comes and goes.

00:21:20.168 --> 00:21:22.908
The children walk for three miles
to come to school

00:21:23.181 --> 00:21:25.996
and find there is no Internet
and walk back three miles.

00:21:26.471 --> 00:21:28.971
Naturally they are not
very happy about it.

00:21:29.481 --> 00:21:31.351
But in the middle of all this,

00:21:32.221 --> 00:21:37.611
what they do is to find games,
download them and play them.

00:21:39.630 --> 00:21:42.360
Somehow they are able
to get to that point.

00:21:43.012 --> 00:21:46.503
I asked them what a web page was recently,

00:21:47.977 --> 00:21:50.462
and they thought for a while.

00:21:50.462 --> 00:21:54.225
They said, "It's made
by someone who is not here,

00:21:55.032 --> 00:22:00.274
someone very far away who sends it
somehow over those things

00:22:01.092 --> 00:22:04.024
which look like the cream colored snakes."

00:22:04.268 --> 00:22:05.742
(Laughter)

00:22:07.018 --> 00:22:10.138
This is the latest of the areas.
I don't have a picture of it.

00:22:10.138 --> 00:22:12.448
It's a hexagonal, our best structure.

00:22:13.481 --> 00:22:17.626
In there, the studies are just beginning.

00:22:19.111 --> 00:22:23.371
It took a lot of time to build,
and it cost close to a million dollars,

00:22:24.402 --> 00:22:26.472
but there are a thousand children,

00:22:27.751 --> 00:22:31.981
thousand very interesting children
added to the Cloud.

00:22:33.508 --> 00:22:34.733
Thank you.

00:22:35.040 --> 00:22:37.100
(Applause)