The Future of Learning

In this talk, Sugata Mitra will take us through the origins of schooling as we know it, to the dematerialization of institutions as we know them. Thirteen years of experiments in children's education provide a series of startling results—children can self-organize their own learning, they can achieve educational objectives on their own, and they can read by themselves. Finally, the most startling result: groups of children with access to the Internet can learn anything by themselves. Studies in the slums of India; the villages of India and Cambodia; poor schools in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, and Italy; the schools of Gateshead; and the rich international schools of Washington and Hong Kong produced experimental results that show a strange new future for learning. Using the TED Prize, Mitra has now built seven "Schools in the Cloud," glimpses of which he will provide.