Learning

A few weeks ago, I called for the abolition of elementary school: in balance, I think it does more harm than good, the money can be better spent on alternative education, or even just watching them and keeping them safe while they just be kids.

"But how will they learn?"

Question: If you turn a kid, with all that energy, loose around something that interests them, how do you stop them?

Along those lines, this story from Frontline is a fascinating read.

It's about an experiment in India where a professor put a computer terminal in, literally, a hole in the wall, in the middle of a dirt-poor neighborhood. The idea was to see what the neighborhood children - among the poorest children in the world (amid all the talk of job outsourcing, it's hard to recall the poverty that still dominates so much of India) would do.

The results were interesting:

To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine.

One boy in particular, Rajinder, has become a computer whiz and a celebrity in India. "Mainly I go to the Disney site," Rajinder tells FRONTLINE/World, but he also regularly visits news sites and likes to use computer paint tools. His teacher says that Rajinder is a much better student now: "He has become quite bold and expressive. I've got great hopes for this child."

When Dr. Mitra asks Rajinder to define the Internet, the doe-eyed boy replies immediately, "That with which you can do anything."

After the success of the first hole in the wall, Mitra replicated his unique experiment in other settings, each time with the same result. Within hours and without instruction, children began browsing the Web.

When O'Connor returned to India this year, he documented Mitra's campaign to set up more computer kiosks in poor communities. This time, Mitra and his colleagues made a special effort to recruit girls -- a revolutionary concept in a society in which only one in three females can read.

Again, Mitra was delighted with the results. Given permission, girls rushed to the computers. "I feel great!" exclaims Anjana, an enthusiastic girl who lives in Madangir, a low-income district of New Delhi. At home, her family is a bit mystified. Anjana's sister-in-law is a stay-at-home housewife who has never seen a computer. But she is thrilled that Anjana has the opportunity to master a technology that seems to offer so much promise. "It increases her knowledge," she says, "and it will be a big help when she looks for a job."

No teacher, no curriculum, no compulsion - they just learned it.

I design human-computer interaction for a living - so this next part was interesting in a usability-geek kind of way:

Dr. Mitra likes the way in which Indian children reinvent computer terms and icons in their own language. "They don't call a cursor a cursor, they call it a sui, which is Hindi for needle. And they don't call the hourglass symbol the hourglass because they've never seen an hourglass before. They call it the damru, which is Shiva's drum, and it does look a bit like that."

The whole thing is worth a read. I may even have to figure out where my cable system put Channel 2...

Posted by Mitch at June 21, 2005 05:58 AM | TrackBack