Sugata Mitra starts by touching on a simple fact. Education started out by creating students to be suitable for certain jobs like factory jobs. All students needed to be able to perform a certain way and know certain things for that demanding job. He inferences "creating robots for robotic jobs" which is in a way true. The problem is even though time has changed, society has changed, and the types of jobs have changed, the education to get students suitable for the current reality has not changed. We are simply preparing students for jobs that don't exist any more. What we are suppose to be doing is preparing them for the future. So instead of teaching to the past, preparing for robot jobs which we actually have robots for, we have to teach to the future. It's almost contradicting because in a way we still are suppose to be preparing our students for don't even exist yet. But not with robotic like environments, but with creative, expressive, differentiating, and enriching learning environments.
He emphasizes the fact that we have to stop waisting time on things we think are important like neat handwriting, when already majority of the time only type now so you can image what the future will be like. It could be as simple as talking into a device and have everything documented in paper format. In Mitra's words, "We need to design a future for learning" and he believes SOLE (self organized learning environment) is the answer to that. I'm interested to see as my teaching career begins how I can make a difference toward designing a better future for learning as well as witnessing Mitra's idea expand across the country.
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