Independence and Learning

In his TedTalk, "The child-driven education", Sugata Mitra from India talks about his experiments with turning computers over to children and then walking away and watching the amazing things children learn independently.  For example, here is his description of one experiment:

"And I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero -- I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them -- they get another zero, I'll go back and say, 'Yes, we need teachers for certain things.'"

"I called in 26 children. They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. It's all in English, and I'm going. (Laughter) So I left them with it. I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. I said, 'Well, did you look at any of the stuff?' They said, 'Yes, we did.' 'Did you understand anything?' 'No, nothing.' So I said, 'Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?' They said, 'We look at it every day.' So I said, 'For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?' So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, 'Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else.'"

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