Salman Khan introduced KHAN ACADEMY and now Sugata Mitra tells us that WE DON’T NEED THE ACADEMIES AT ALL!!!

Schools are designed to produce children who will:
-please their parents (because they send the children to school)
-please the government (because they pay for the school)

Schools are not designed for:
-employers (because they don’t pay schools)
-peers (because who cares what peers think? they dont count)

20 or more years later, parents would be gone, the government changed 5 times, the employers – strange new jobs. The peers would be only ones around, for whose desires we do not design schools.

This is how Sugata Mitra’s blog introduces me to his thoughts…

He goes on to say…

From neuroscience:- threat perception stops the prefrontal cortex from rational thought. a teacher hovering around produces threat perception, as do examinations- suppression of emotion also stops the prefrontal cortex, this is what happens when we ‘engineer’ behaviour.creative thought and imagination activate when there is no threat perception, no emotion suppression, peer interaction and imaginative problems.From history:- the education system is designed to produce identical clerks to run an empire that does not exist and a manufacturing industry that has gone away.

In other words, we are doing everything – exactly wrong.

The curriculum should be taken from the nature of the Universe and our purpose, if any. The universe has a scale from around zero to the 30th power of 10 as far as I can guess. Time goes from the big bang to plus infinity as far as we know. If we examine each power of ten over each epoch of time, will get a curriculum.

Then we can use a combination of the findings of neurosciece and peer expectations to build an education that will produce people who cannot run empires, fight wars, kill animals, hit other people – but are quite intersting, fun to be with and get along well with each other.

Watch him speak…