Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.

In this TED talk video, Sugata Mitra shows that, perhaps, the only thing we need to do to better education is to leave education to children themselves. If we give them access to information and ask them a question, they will acquire an answer in hours. If Mitra’s hypothesis is true, then education and our conception of social organization in total could be totally changed, simply by access to information.

One of the most amazing things that Mitra’s experiments show is that exploration of topics under investigation can occur in the absence of a common language. Mitra gives children in India a program on biotechnology. These children don’t speak English; the program is written in English but the kids can only understand Tamil. Within weeks, the kids are able to pass 30% of an exam. Now, this seems disastrous, but think: how would you understand science if you couldn’t read the textbook? When a supervisor (not a teacher) was added into the equation to push the children toward success, their scores increased to 50% proficiency.

Additionally, Mitra argues that isolation to technology does not allow children to learn. He posits that forcing the kids to work together requires them to teach each other, a question which Khan Academy has been exploring for some time now. If technology poses the kind of power that these too speakers alone assert, then perhaps we need to entirely rethink the structure of education.