Education Researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize.  He will use his $1M prize to build a school in the cloud, accessible by any student, anywhere, anytime.  His original research found that children in rural, poverty stricken villages, with no understanding of English, if left unattended with zero supervision or instruction, but with access to a computer placed in a hole in their village wall, could in a rapid amount of time teach themselves English, as well as a variety of subjects, again with no supervision.  Some of the quotes from Mitra’s TED Talk are below:

“In nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West.”

“It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken — it's not broken, it's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.”

“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.”

Is knowing really obsolete?  Can access to any information, even ubiquitous access that the Internet offers, really lead to learning?  Mitra believes that small groups of students grouped by ability and affirmed and encouraged by a physically present adult (who does not need to be a teacher) who ensures a safe environment to learn and catalyzes the learning with a question or two can replace schools as we know them with self organized learning environments (SOLEs).  Mitra believes these SOLEs can be launched everywhere and access cloud based technology enabled curriculums to allow learning to happen. 

Mitra’s research and scaling ambition needs to applauded on many levels.  Children in the third world getting access to the world’s information provides a pathway for elevating the bottom third of the world’s next generation to reach their potential.  The folks at TED.com obviously see the enormous potential behind the idea.

Mitra’s research and scaling ambition needs to challenged on a few levels as well.  There’s a deliberate bypassing of pedagogy, teacher-led instruction and school as a transferring mechanism of a society’s culture, democracy and values from one generation to another.  Is knowing really just a question of access to information?  Will critical thinking skills emerge automatically through technology?  If knowledge is a free commodity, how will students translate that knowledge into understanding and that understanding into wisdom? 

I am both fascinated and scared by Mitra’s research.   Fascinated by the power and lure of technology specifically as an agent or conduit of learning for children everywhere, but particularly in the most remote and impoverished regions of our world.  I guess I should not be all that surprised.  Given a choice between playing an online video game and sitting in the lap of grandpa for a story, kids will usually leave grandpa in the dust. 

My fear comes in what this means for a generation of teachers and the future of schooling.  I’ve argued in the past on the importance of teachers and the hands-on inspiration, motivation and magic only they can provide to a student.  I still hold that view.  But let’s face it.  15 years ago we could not have imagined that the majority of updates we would give our friends about our lives, personal details and travels would come not face-to-face, nor even by phone, but via technology with no direct physical interaction.  Facebook continues to grow with 1B users and counting. 

There are way more investments today in cutting edge technologies, video games and other online applications for learning than there is the teaching profession.  How likely are the education departments of Colleges and Universities likely to keep pace with this technological advancement so that their graduates will know how to both use and leverage these emerging technologies in ways that don’t make the teacher obsolete, but even more valuable?  How many venture capital firms are investing in the next generation of teachers and not just the next generation of learning apps?  Are teachers racing against time – hoping for relevance?  If the notion of school becomes obsolete is the obsolescence of an in classroom teacher far behind?

Most education pundits would argue that the traditional role of teacher is becoming obsolete, not the teacher.  Teaching in and for the 21st century they say will require a new kind of a teacher, with a new role or multiple roles that are less reliant on content expertise and more dependent upon coaching and facilitating.  Mitra himself suggests this somewhat in this NY Times interview.  Sounds nice and even plausible.  But we don’t get to shape and plan how and where technology will disrupt an industry.  We don’t get to architect who the winners and losers are when disruption occurs. 

I raise these questions because I think they are real.  I think they need to be answered in ways that not purely emotional or ideological, or they will be answered for us by the marketplace by ways that are not emotional or ideological, but pragmatic, efficient and perhaps like social media’s influence on friendships and face-to-face interactions…inevitable.