What will it be tomorrow?
Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that, at the
point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes?
Could it be -- a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by
Nicholas Negroponte -- could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a
future where knowing is obsolete? But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens.
Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes. But look at it this way.
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo
sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. What an achievement
that is. But we have to integrate that into our own future.
Encouragement seems to be
the key. If you look at Kuppam, if you look at all of the experiments that I
did, it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning.
There is evidence from
neuroscience. The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our
brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the
prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment
and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut
their brains down, and then we say, "Perform." Why did they create a
system like that? Because it was needed. There was an age in the Age of Empires
when you needed those people who can survive under threat. When you're standing
in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed.
If you didn't, you failed. But the Age of Empires is gone. What happens to
creativity in our age? We need to shift that balance back from threat to
pleasure.
Sugata Mitra's TED Talk, "Build a School in the Cloud" …
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