House of Commons Meeting – Re-thinking Education
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Join us in the House of Commons to consider this intriguing question with ex-teacher Emma Hardy MP and TED Prize winner Professor Sugata Mitra, whose work inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire. Sugata brushes aside all establishment thinking on education, and Emma considers that we urgently need new approaches to how we prepare young people for a very different future.
Is our traditional system of teacher-led subject-based learning destined for the history books?
Following 20 years of study and experiment with children in England and many other countries, Sugata discovered something quite startling: children with access to the Internet can learn anything by themselves and provide answers to complex, multidisciplinary problems. And central to this process is the children’s abilities to speak, deliberate and engage with their peers, not dissimilar to what happens in today’s workplace.
Using funds from his TED Prize, Sugata has recently built seven ‘Schools in the Cloud’, where Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) and a ‘Granny Cloud’ of mediators over the Internet interact with unsupervised children. The results of this three-year study are not yet fully analysed but he will present some of the findings at this event.
Are we beginning to see some glimpses of what schools should be for and what curricular, pedagogic and assessment changes will be required in the future? Examinations as we know them will have to go, Sugata says.
There is a desperate and long overdue need to discuss what policies, strategies, processes and changes government should be considering in order to prepare for a world where Artificial Super Intelligence will dramatically alter the way we work, play and live together. This will require radically new approaches to the way we do education.
Emma Hardy was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament for Hull West and Hessle at the 2017 general election. She is a member of the House of Commons Education Select Committee and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Oracy, which co-ordinates research, promotes best practice and encourages the overarching principles of democracy in education and society at large.
Sugata Mitra is Professor and Principal Research Investigator at Newcastle University. He was born in Calcutta, India in 1952 and is a physicist by training. He has worked on Organic Semiconductors, Energy Storage Systems, Bots, Remote Presence, complex dynamical systems and, particularly on Children, the Internet and Learning. Since his ground-breaking ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment in 1999, is work has received worldwide attention. He is a recipient of many awards, among them, the prestigious million-dollar TED Prize in 2013.