Child-Driven Educaiton

This post references Sugata Mitra's TED talk, "The child-driven education." It also refers to articles by Gee, Godsey, and Kafai & Peppler. It is a response to the quesiton, "Does Mitra offer a form of 21st century learning? Or is child-driven education suspended in the 20th century?"


Does Mitra offer a form of 21st century learning? The short answer is yes. His experiments show that even with minimal input and direction from a teacher students are able to demonstrate problem solving and content retention. It deviates substantially from the paradigm of the 20th and 19th centuries in which a teacher was the focus of attention and emulation. Furthermore, technology has finally reached a level of sophistication to bring his SOLEs to every corner of the planet. 

I believe Mitra’s statement that “children will learn to do what they want to learn to do” is corroborated by the work of Kafai and Peppler, and that of James Paul Gee. Kafai and Peppler show how online Do It Yourself (DIY) communities demonstrate that children are willing to put in significant amounts of time learning, doing, and teaching the things that they are interested in. Gee points out that children voluntarily invest time in video games to solve complex problems, often collaborating with others to share hints or give assistance. Both articles stress that design is the important impetus that will turn the student’s natural enthusiasm into meaningful educational experiences. This is where we, as some of Mitra’s 100,000,000 mediators, come in. 

Child-driven education is not without its problems, however. Mitra certainly offers a form of 21st century learning, but probably not the only one. I believe children can be self-driven to learn things that interest them and Mitra’s experiments benefited from the novelty of the delivery. Will governments really invest in an education system that cultivates the interests of children over one that prepares them for the myriad demands of a modern economy? At some point, I believe, students need to learn from the masters. The Godsey article points out how some nascent entities are facilitating forms of 21st century learning that are threatening to co-opt the traditional classroom teacher. These same distributing and facilitating organisations seem to be simultaneously reinforcing the expert’s important role in education. 

I experienced a range of emotions while dealing with this material. On the one hand I feel like our way of life as teachers is at risk and all the training I have accrued is becoming obsolete. On the other hand I think the skills gained from the MET program will help me maintain my relevance in the changing landscape of pedagogy. (If education becomes child-driven, the word “pedagogy” itself will become a misnomer).  But in the end, I feel that the 21st century will be, and is, the century of diversity in the realm of education. As technology facilitates innovative teaching methods and exacting data collection and interpretation, we will see that a variety of methods are effective and feasible. It is an exciting time to be a teacher.