Kids Can Teach Themselves

A Lesson in Community Building and Team Education

Did you ever worry that technology was taking over true education? Ever fear that education as we know it would no longer be the same due to the inhumane computer screen? As an educator, I have found that allowing students the opportunity to engage and offer solutions to questions that even the educator “does not know” offers everyone an opportunity to engage and be educators. 

Sugata Mitra's Social Experiment

Educational researcher, Sugata Mitra, created a unique experiment in 1999 in New Delhi. He focused on the use of educational technology to test the power of children’s ability to teach themselves through group interactions and problem-solving analysis. What he found was somewhat fascinating, but all the more common than most educators expect.

For the experiment, Mitra placed a powerful PC in a wall in one of the slums of New Delhi, a place where children struggled to attend school let alone ever use a computer. There was no audio, no instructions, just a computer. Mitra wanted to see if the power of education truly laid more with the educator than it did with the student. And he found a complex answer.

The students, who initially were curious about the contraption in the wall, began to explore it day by day, child by child. Eventually, as two children, a 6 and 8 year old’s knowledge exponentially grew and they began solving issues, such as web searching, typing and spelling in English just within 8 hours, more children began to follow. And thus the education began: with curiosity, a challenge, and group of peers to work together to solve it. 

An Evolution of Group Learning

The results were fascinating. Children began to search for things using the English language, though they had no formal training in English, the learned to troubleshoot, type, edit, all within a matter of hours. 

In 1965, Bruce Tuckman, determined that the "Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing" Model is a necessary progression in sustainable and cooperative learning. It first begins with the forming of an idea or goal by a central source (in this case the first young child to stumble upon the computer), then the storming of a purpose by group members, though initially unclear will turn into a norming or a more defined sense of purpose in attaining a specific goal as a group, which will finally culminate in performing, or in this case, figuring out how to search, type and troubleshoot a foreign device in a foreign language! 

The children in this example clearly model the importance and success of such learning environments. Community-based, self-instructed groups of children can teach themselves to use the internet, and just as in history, have proven that knowledge does indeed grow in groups and curiosity. In this case, technology doesn’t prove to be the educator but young people do. The technology in this piece not only shows the importance of group education, but that it shows how creating a solution to a unique and difficult challenge can create incentive to not only learn teach ourselves technology, but language, community building and the ultimate power to teach.