Just Another Hole in the Wall | Life, Meaning, Albert Camus & the Absurd. Fans of Professor Sugata Mitra (professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK) – see his unmissable talk on the hole-in-the-wall experiments if the name is unknown to you) will doubtless object to the allusion to the Pink Floyd song, hinting at a parallel between holes and bricks, and casting a negative light on the former, but I want to argue that there is a certain continuity between the Floydian bricks and Sugata Mitra’s holes. At first sight Sugata Mitra might seem like a bit of a revolutionary, arguing for a break with the dark night of the present in the name of some glowing new educational dawn. The appearance is deceptive. If we step back a bit and recall the character of our economic context, we might see how his approach services the new economy in a way that bears a striking parallel to the way the older schools churned out the bricks in the walls of the previous economic order.
What are these two economic orders? Like this: Like Loading... Sugata Mitra and the new educational Romanticism – a parody. We live in an age which, for some odd reason, needs desperately to believe that it is continually being born anew – that its essence is something utterly different from the past, and so the old idea of trying to understand ourselves in terms of what has been now sounds as laughable as the attitude of the boy who wanted to go down the mines because his beloved father, with his cap and his lamp, radiated a certain nobility.
But to those of us who are the intellectual miners of modernity the continuities are far more striking than the novelties of things like touch screens and the reduction of everything to only two digits. One of those continuities is seen in the line that can be drawn between that great Romantic of the early modern period, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the movement represented by Sugata Mitra – a movement that could therefore be called a new pedagogic Romanticism. But to the antiquarian miner of modernity this impression of inspiring progress is misleading. Mere images. Sugata Mitra / Negroponte: Knowing is obsolete - a critical response. If Sugata Mitra thinks of himself as basically a humble scientist investigating the benefits of educational technology, he is deceiving himself.
His appeal – the crucial factor explaining his rise to fame – lies not in the scientific rigor of his work (which people like Payal Arora and Donald Clark have criticised) but in the tweet-length myths that he has been helping to spin. In a previous post we looked at the Sugata Mitra myth of the end of empire. Another myth is the idea that knowing is now becoming obsolete. In his February 2013 TED talk he said this: Could it be that we won’t need to go to school at all? Now, Sugata Mitra can’t actually mean that there will be no knowing. If we think about what is supposed to happen in the SOLEs, we see that what is really obsolete for Mitra is an older idea of the curriculum as a list of particular things that students ought to become familiar with.
Part of the reason for taking this approach to knowledge concerns technology. No, it is not. Just Another Hole in the Wall « Life, Meaning, Albert Camus & the Absurd. Sugata Mitra's odd concept of outdoctrination. According to Professor Sugata Mitra, outdoctrination is what should counteract the dreaded indoctrination. It involves what Sugata Mitra calls a “minimally invasive” form of education. A school (it could be an old-fashioned maximally invasive school) sets aside some space and time for a “self-organising learning environment” (SOLE).
The crucial tools in the room are PCs connected to the internet – enough PCs for the students to use them in small groups. The students are given the freedom to surf the web to pursue their educational interests. The outdoctrination then occurs when students find information and opinions or value judgments that conflict with those they have acquired during their earlier indoctrination. Inevitably doubts emerge about the truth of what they had previously been led to believe, and so the liberating process of outdoctrination begins. Isn’t this great? What’s the alternative? One reason has to do with the value of individuality. Indoctrination outdoctrination.