If Children Have Interest, Education Happens...

I am very impressed with the experiments that Sugata Mitra composed with self-directed learning. I think his research shows that self-directed learning is very important in today's time. The children need to learn how to find the answers and knowledge that they need instead of having someone teach them things that may never play a role in their lives. But, I don't think what Mitra showed was completely self-directed learning. He guided the children a little bit. I also think that if you put a computer in front of American kids who already had more access to the Internet and computers, they may be more likely to play games and not really do educational things with it.

I read some of the comments under the video and they were very intriguing as well. One person mentioned confidence and critical thinking are the only skills necessary to have any kind of achievement. I think they are two very important skills, but I also believe children need a little more than that. If children only learned what they wanted to learn, they would lose so much important information that may not be useful to them everyday, but are still important things to learn. If I only learned what I wanted, I would not know any kind of math. I hate math but I understand that I need to know some of it - like how to find percentages so I know how much 30% off is of a sweater that I am dying to own.

Anyway, I think Mitra has some good points about how eager the kids were to learn when they were left alone and received little more than encouragement from "grandmothers", but I think there is a little more than just leaving kids with computers and having them teach themselves. There can still be self-directed learning but with encouragement and guidance from teachers.