Student Reaction: The School in the Cloud

I gave this assignment last week:

The School in the Cloud
Sugata Mitra was around 10 years ahead of his time. If you're going to go into a TED talk and say "schools are obsolete", you'd better have something interesting to say. He does.

Write if what you see changed your mind about learning, education, and school. If it did, explain how and why. If it didn't, explain that as well please. I hope each and every one of you is doing well.

One of the young women in my Public Speaking class reacted to it like this. She allows you to see through her lens when shown something like Mitra's experiment in unleashing human potential:

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"Sugata Mitra speaks about present day learning being outdated in light of the fact that it is equivalent to what it was 300 years prior and to this I concur. The reason that students aren't as advanced isn't because schools are broken, because they aren't, it's essentially on the grounds that the method of teaching hasn't changed. We sit in rows, individually spaced and learn the exact same thing in the same way as those before us.

We don't learn present day history, what is happening in our world now, but we sure know everything that happened in the past. In our present reality, most jobs are computer based, Mitra believes that employees don't need to know how to do math or how to write legibly. You see, we don't actually know what the jobs of the future are going to be, so how is present day schooling going to prepare individuals for what's ahead of them.

Individuals are continually wondering why the rich and their offspring remain rich and those of the lower class remain in the lower class. It is not that the rich produce gifted children but that they have access, access to better schooling and technologies.

Mitra did an experiment where he gave a computer to unfortunate children, left them with if for a couple months and he came back to realized that they taught themselves another language, how to use the computer and learned biology at age 12. The reason the children aren't more advanced than they are today is the lack of motivation to switch things up when it comes to educating. This can be justified by past videos presented to us:

• Rick Ross: Not achieving legitimate training because educators were focused on just earning money
• Robert Kiyosaki: The education system is designed to teach how to become an employee
• Taylor Gatto: Schools are a way to control the thoughts and behavior, real life experiences are what teaches and test individuals."

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Here was my response:

You have a fantastic mind. I hadn't made the connection to the Rick Ross video - I put that out there for different reason. All of those videos relate and you saw how they dovetailed beautifully. You've got what it takes Aaliyah.