Preparing our children for our past
A Walking Contradiction
What would you like people to know you as? If people want to say, “Well, I know this guy, Sugata. He’s a …” How would you want them to finish the sentence?
Well, it depends on what kind of answer you want. While you were asking the question, I was thinking if I could make a grandiose kind of view and so on, but to be very honest, the answer that popped into my mind is a line from a song by Kris Kristofferson, and that line is, “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”
All children are gifted
What I suddenly noticed: that the few friends that I had in India, I was in New Delhi at the time, who had made the investment to buy a computer, were all saying something similar. They were saying that their children seem to be gifted. So now, I mean, Jane, I mean most of us think that our own children are all gifted.
Of course they are.
So then I asked what happened, and all of them gave these little anecdotes about how they were working on their computer, which their children were not allowed to touch, when suddenly, a little voice from the back said, “Dad, if you were to press Control, Alternate, and Delete, the whole system will boot up,” or something. And then they would turn around and say, “How do you know that?” And they said, “Well, you did that yesterday.” So they all concluded that their children were gifted because they were just picking up stuff by looking.
Like an ATM in wall on the street
And in India, where I was working, there are all these slum children, children on the streets, ostensibly doing nothing much, fooling around. I said, “Well, they should also be gifted. It’s just that they don’t have a computer. That’s all.” So that’s all the experiment was. I just took a computer and I gave it to the children. How did I do that? Well, you can’t give it on the street, so I may have made a little ATM kind of thing in a wall on the street, and I stuck this computer into that, three feet off the ground, and just left it there. And the rest is history.
Within a few hours, the children were browsing, chatting, and people were saying, “Well, who taught them?” And I didn’t know. I thought maybe a passing guy who knew something about computers, so I repeated the experiment. I took it to a village very far from New Delhi, where the chances of a passing computer professional would be zero, and I got the same results.
Learning without teachers
I had to conclude that the learning was happening; no one was teaching. The learning was just happening. Now that’s where, for a physicist, it’s not very difficult to come to that conclusion, because in physics, we have this marvelous thing that physicists are both scared by and love. It’s called emergence. Emergence is when things happen with no ostensible creator or designer. It just happens.
Emergence in a chaotic educational system
Learning can be an emergent phenomenon in a chaotic educational system, and I think that actually got me the TED Prize.
The fact that people recognized it, accepted it?
Accepted it, recognized it, and also realized that here was a mechanism that was essentially new.
Learning anything with a computer connected to the internet
How far can it go? I did a whole series of experiments and finally landed myself in a position where I had to say that groups of unsupervised children, given access to the internet in a safe and public space, can learn. Hold your breath: anything by themselves.
Anything?
Anything, and people said, “Anything?” exactly in the same tone as you said, “Anything?” And I said, “Yes, and there are experiments, which I’ve written about, of the absurd happening.” Tamil-speaking village children, 10-year-olds, talking about DNA replication, simply because there was a computer on which I said, “You see these squiggly little things which look like springs? They’re called DNA. Now, that’s all I know about them.” And a month later, they said, “Well, improper replication of the DNA molecule can cause disease.”
SOLE self-organized-learning-environment
I brought the idea from India into England in 2006 and experimented in the schools in Northeastern England, where I now live. It’s a poorer part of England, and I was able to show that the same conclusions, the same mechanism, will hold in England as well. In fact, it holds even better because the children know English as their own language. We call that a self-organized learning environment, a SOLE: S-O-L-E, Self-Organized Learning Environment. And that caught on, and it moved all over the world, actually.
In my head or in my smartphone
Why do I have to do everything with my own head when I have a Smartphone? In a child’s language, when you tell them, “Do you know the answer to this question?” the correct answer from a child is, “Give me my phone back.”
The internet will vanish into our heads
We know that we all live with the internet in our pockets, literally, 24-by-seven. We do everything with the internet, except during the examination of children. At that time, we take away the internet and say, “Now, perform.” It’s absurd.
Yeah, well, maybe it will change some day, maybe.
Oh, it has to. I mean, not maybe. I used to think maybe, but I don’t any longer because of a very simple calculation. Look at how we access the internet. About 20 years ago, it used to be with those desktop PCs and telephone lines and dialers, for those of us who remember that. Then it all changed, and then it came into the mobile phone, and then the mobile phone became the Smartphone, and the Smartphones got smaller and cheaper and thinner, and then it went into our watches. What’s the logical next step? It will vanish. It will vanish into our eyes or into our ears. Then what are we going to do? Are we going to say to children before an examination, “Okay, guys, we are going to do an MRI or a CAT scan of you before you can enter?” Clearly, in a few years time, we will not be able to tell whether a person is using the internet or not.
Bring the internet into the educational system
First thing: Bring the internet into the education system right now. Bring it in every possible way. To every question that you want to ask a learner, ask them, “Can you figure it out?” I once said jokingly, in a school, those old Victorian schools. There used to be an archway on which the school motto would be written, and it was usually something in Latin or Haycock or something or the other, and it was the school motto. I think we need to change that motto. We need to change it to, “Figure it out.” That’s what the school should be for. That’s what learners should be encouraged to do: “Go ahead. Look on the internet. Talk to yourselves. Talk to each other and tell me the answer. You figure it out.”
Why do we have to do that? Because we have no way in which our past is going to be similar to our children’s future. Currently, I think we are preparing our children for our past.
Generative AI, a war of money
When they first came in, in 2022, a lot of people used to ask me, “So what do you think of this, and what do you think of that?” I said, “Look, I don’t think anything of these things until I know how they work.” So you know what I did? Only a retired person would be foolish enough to try this. I took my little notebook computer, a Dell computer, the one that I’m talking to you on, and I wrote a generative AI program on it and discovered very quickly that it won’t work with that little computer. It needs a really big computer. And I knew something really good about generative AI: It’s not a war of algorithms between OpenAI and Google. It’s a war of money.
His lonely way back home
That’s the purpose of this podcast. I call it Imaginize World, and it’s a question of imagining something before we can create it. I think you’re an example of a person who does that. Or maybe you don’t imagine what you’re going to create, but you have a sense of a direction. Is that true, or am I reading too much into it?
Well, you want a one-liner? Remember what we started with in this conversation? Partly truth and partly fiction.
Fiction.
Followed by the line which I didn’t say: “Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”
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