Slumdog reveals learning treasures - May 22, 2010
The education project that inspired an oscar winning film is now being tried in schools in the north-east.
In the most destitute slums of India, many children lack any formal education. Where schooling is available, the classes are enormous, spanning young and older pupils and offering little one-to-one attention. It's an unlikely source of inspiration for a teaching method to boost attainment, self-confidence and behaviour in Britain's classrooms.
It's a year since Education Guardian exclusively reported Mitra's Hole In The Wall learning project, in which he installed computers with internet connection in Delhi slums for local children to discover. He found that the children began to teach themselves English, computing and maths, just a month after starting to use the PCs. The project inspired Vikas Swarup's Q&A, the novel that became the film Slumdog Millionaire.
Like the film, Mitra's project has since found massive success: there are more than 500 PCs in walls across India and Africa. Now, as professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, Mitra is turning his eye to Britain. Working with eight- to 12-year-olds at schools across Tyneside, he is helping them to use computers to carry out "self-activated learning" in the classroom.
"Having watched hundreds of Indian children learning without teachers at the Hole In The Wall computers, it became obvious that all children can work by themselves, if they want to," Mitra says.
"Most British children grow up with the internet and have the means to learn what they want in minutes, and this challenges the traditional idea of school being about learning things that will come in handy in the future. They become disengaged."