Voices
the world’s military-industrial machine running at the zenith of the
British Empire, Victorians assembled an education system to massproduce workers with identical
skills. Plucked from the classroom
and plugged instantly into the system, citizens were churned through
an educational factory engineered
for maximum productivity.
Like most things designed by
the Victorians, it was a robust
system. It worked. Schools, in a
sense, manufactured generations
of workers for an industrial age.
But what got us here, won’t get
us there. Schools today are the
product of an expired age; standardized curricula, outdated pedagogy, and cookie cutter assessments
are relics of an earlier time. Schools
still operate as if all knowledge is
contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored
in each human brain — to be used
when needed. The political and
financial powers controlling schools
decide what these salient points
are. Schools ensure their storage
and retrieval. Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.
Today we’re seeing institutions
— banking, the stock exchange,
entertainment, newspapers, even
SUGATA
MITRA
health care — capture and share
knowledge through strings of zeros and ones inside the evolving
Internet ... “the cloud.” While
some fields are already far advanced in understanding how the
internet age is transforming their
structure and substance, we’re
just beginning to understand the
breadth and depth of its implications on the future of education.
Unlocking the power of new
technologies for self-guided education is one of the 21st-century
superhighways that need to be
paved. Profound changes to how
children access vast information
is yielding new forms of peerto-peer and individual-guided
learning. The cloud is already
omnipresent and indestructible,
democratizing and ever changing;
TED and The Huffington Post are
excited to bring you TEDWeekends,
a curated weekend program that
i