Mitra Myths – Slum children with No English?
Sugata Mitra was much discussed by the Twitterati yesterday.The Guardian article is here.The TES article earlier this week is here. Tom Bennett’s critique is here.
For some it was the confirmation they needed that self-directed learning is real and superior. For others he is a charlatan whose research is deeply flawed and does not stand up to scrutiny.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Guardian article was that it did interview one of the children who took part in the original Hole in the Wall experiment. He is now a Yale PhD student – amazing success for a project you’d think.
Arun Chavan’s testimony is interesting (all the more so as it was ignored by those enthusing about children teaching themselves). The following is what he had to say about his experience.
Later, I get hold of Chavan to ask him about the impact of the hole-in-the-wall project on his educational achievement, and there’s a pause while he thinks about how to answer. “I’ve been asked this before and I’m always really uncomfortable with the idea of this as a hole-in-the-wall to Yale kind of story,” he says. “I feel like some of the most important influences I had were the people I had the opportunity to meet. It opened up my mind to a lot of things.”
It’s not a magic bullet, then? “No, technology is not a magic bullet. I wouldn’t be the only person saying it. But then, when it comes to something as complex as education, nothing is magic.”
From the horses mouth.
I then came across a TEDBlog interview with Chavan here. Here’s the crux of the matter. Mitra never looked into the backgrounds of these children or investigated them in any way. But he has categorically stated that the children were from the slums. Chavan’s testimony in that article does not seem to suggest this was really the case. Look at his answer to the following Q & A in the TEDBlog interview.
What were your first thoughts when the street-side computer appeared in your community?
I was a kid then, studying in the sixth grade. I had never handled a computer before. I thought it was great to have those computers lying around to play with. I don’t remember being afraid to use them. I think we figured out soon enough that restarting the computer fixes almost every problem!
The hole in the wall computers had been placed near slums not in them. Chavan may have been poor but that doesn’t mean he didn’t attend school. Chavan goes on to state that his father wrote and directed plays.
I really doubt even in India that a playwright lives in slums and well they write plays so are literate… which I am guessing would have benefitted his child.
Thing is, in India, as in many places, people with different levels of income may still live cheek by jowl. Just because you put the computer in an area where there are slums nearby does not mean only those particular children would have accessed them.
Chavan’s testimony in both articles does state that he feels he learnt to use the computer from scratch – fair enough. But these were not the illiterate slum children that Mitra makes them out to be. Here’s another one of Chavan’s answers in the TEDBlog:
Are you still in contact with the kids you studied with using the “Hole in the Wall” computer?
Unfortunately, I am not in contact with many of my friends from that time. Some of us went to different cities to attend college after high school. Most of those who stayed back attended vocational training programs and are working now.
Education in India is not a free affair – many costs have to be paid even for state schools. It is not even in the same league as the UK in terms of children from lower SES having the same opportunities as their peers. While Mitra emphasises the areas where children from slums could use the computers they were placed in villages. Villages in India do not contain a poverty ridden population anymore than they do in England.
Does this mean none of the children who took part were from the slums. No of course I imagine some were but the idea that it was poor illiterate slum children learning to surf the internet from scratch is far from the truth in at least some of the cases. The children were in school and had been in primary too.
Children did learn how to use a computer. Indeed Chavan states in the TEDBlog interview that this is what he takes away from it all but it is just this. It did not have a wider impact on his learning.
In the Guardian article Mitra states how he wanted to innovate further still in light of the hole in the wall project so:
“I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil-speaking 12-year-old children in a south Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”
He has gone into more detail in a different Guardian article here. Impressively they did. Another victory for self learning by children using the internet!! They even learnt it in a language they did not know and obviously taught themselves English through the internet (at least that is the impression that is given).
Slight problem here – the children were in a village not a slum and were not tested prior to using this technology. There is more than just a small chance they would have been attending school.
The best bit? They may have been Tamil speakers but what Mitra has conveniently omitted is that India has a three language policy.
It has done since it became independent, as a compromise solution to the need for a national language, as well as preserving local languages. Not everyone was happy about having to learn Hindi as many had learnt English as their second language up to that point. So the three languages policy was born – all children who attend school learn Hindi, English and their local language.
One of the areas that had wanted English was… drum rolls please… Tamil Nadur. So it seems that for quite a long time now people in that part of the India have been learning English at school, as their second language. Good chance their parents, grandparents, etc have too. They may even have grown up with books in different languages.
It is still impressive if they learnt and understood the basics of biotechnology but please let us not pretend that they taught themselves English as part of this process.
There are many reasons to doubt Mitra’s research, this is just the tip of the iceberg. To say that it should be adopted in classrooms is a throwback to the 1970s.
If there is one thing that does need to change in our education system – it is the attitude that any idea that a teacher likes can and should be implemented in the classroom because they are the teacher and a ‘professional’. Being professional is a state of mind not a quality that one possesses regardless of ones actions.
August 3, 2015 @ 3:35 am
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber and commented:
Mitra’s Myths
A reply to Debra Kidd on self-directed learning | Filling the pail
August 4, 2015 @ 11:24 am
[…] we have to accept that some children taught themselves how to use computers. But which children? As @teach_well has discovered, although located near to slums, it is not clear that it is slum children who benefited from […]
September 1, 2015 @ 9:50 am
Your sheer ignorance of how India (or any other country outside your radar) functions is appalling. And the authority with which you impose your ignorance is even more befuddling. You should not attempt to write an article without having any idea of the economic or cultural context of the place. ”I really doubt even in India that a playwright lives in slums and well they write plays so are literate… ” Slums in India are home to a wide range of people and don’t necessary the ones from Slumdog Millionaire and to assume that everyone in a slum is illiterate is your next folly. Also, why assume that a person living in a slum cannot write or direct plays? Does Chavan ever mention that his father is a well-paid, successful playwright? He could very well be a car mechanic who is passionate about theatre! Indian villages are not better off than the slums nor do they have better educational facilities. This is exactly where Mitra’s work is magnificent. He talks about remoteness and the deficit of good teachers in remote areas. This is where child driven education triumphs. Also India does not have a 3 language policy in all schools. Many schools only teach in the vernacular. Many schools introduce English in the fifth grade. And most of the fluency of English is dismissible. And it is ludicrous to assume that three generations of Tamilians in a tiny village know enough English to teach their youngsters. The ignorance here is laughable. You unfortunately have neither understood the experiment nor its cultural context. And Tom Bennett’s article is a sour rant at the best. A critique to any experiment or method is essential but kindly base it on some solid ground. And oh, I am an Indian.
September 1, 2015 @ 11:55 am
I have never had such an angry rant – for which you provide not one iota of evidence by the way other than the fact that you are Indian and that seems to be your main reason for critiquing my blogpost (not an article as it is not in a newspaper). But let’s deal with the points one by one.
Your sheer ignorance of how India (or any other country outside your radar) functions is appalling.
Well you have made a rather large assumption there haven’t you? Both of my parents are Indian and lived there until they were 18. My family in England is similarly comprised of aunts and uncles who all grew up in India.Most of my family still lives in India – both in villages and cities. In addition, I have grown up in a city with a large Indian population, therefore have grown up with people whose parent come from a wide variety of regions in India.
Therefore that is a couple of hundred people’s experiences I am basing my opinions on not on a wikipedia article as not doubt you have assumed. At best you could argue that I am making assumptions based on the regions of India that they have come from and therefore if it doesn’t extrapolate to the whole country. However, their experiences do seem to tally up pretty much in terms of the general standard of education received in various locations.
And the authority with which you impose your ignorance is even more befuddling.
I could argue the same for what you have just written – unless of course you have indeed lived in every single part of India and had the privilege of working in hundreds of schools, your experience is in fact far less representative than those of the people I know.
You should not attempt to write an article without having any idea of the economic or cultural context of the place.
You really shouldn’t assume that I have none.
”I really doubt even in India that a playwright lives in slums and well they write plays so are literate… ” Slums in India are home to a wide range of people and don’t necessary the ones from Slumdog Millionaire and to assume that everyone in a slum is illiterate is your next folly.
I take this point on board I read this article recently http://bit.ly/1N6RPfD so accept the scale of the problem is different to what I assumed. However without a solid definition of what they mean by ‘literacy’ I do not take the figures on face value. Certainly there have been huge improvements in the number of children who live in slum areas that attend school. However this line of argument actually mitigates against Mitra – he was the one who presented these children as illiterate and from the slums. So to state they miraculously learnt to use the computer to write is illegitimate if they already had a degree of literacy to begin with.
Also, why assume that a person living in a slum cannot write or direct plays? Does Chavan ever mention that his father is a well-paid, successful playwright? He could very well be a car mechanic who is passionate about theatre!
If he indeed did live in the slums then why not say? At no point has it been shown that he did in fact live ‘in’ a slum, just that he lived near the hole in the wall computer. Not the same thing at all. His own testimony argues against any gains made in learning other than learning how to use a computer.
Indian villages are not better off than the slums nor do they have better educational facilities.
Most of my family lived in small villages and therefore this is a ridiculous assertion that you make because I assume you think I am a white English person who has no connection with India. Try it on with someone else. Also this is the precise kind of idea that Mitra feeds on. You may wish to actually spend some time in various villages in India – I have. My family in India who live in villages live in homes not slums and neither is their existence anything like that. That there are some poor people in those villages does not mean that there are not well off villagers. This comment actually is beginning to make me question whether you are, as you assert to be, Indian. What a sweeping generalisation and completely wrong. Oh and I think my family would beg to differ on the education front seeing as they have attended excellent schools.
This is exactly where Mitra’s work is magnificent.
No his work is incredibly poor and not worthy of the attention is has received.
He talks about remoteness and the deficit of good teachers in remote areas.
Not really he talks of how children can learn without teachers good or otherwise.
This is where child driven education triumphs.
Hilarious – you may wish to look at countries where child driven education has triumphed and see how literacy and numeracy rates have decreased rather than increased – check Finland, UK, USA and Australia for a start. Do not kid yourself that children driving their own education means they learn more. It simply means they have huge gaps. If you want Indian children to become more ignorant then please keep advocating nonsense education policies by a person who has never taught children a day in his life.
Also India does not have a 3 language policy in all schools.
The three language policy is the law, that it’s implementation is patchy in a country as vast as India does not surprise me but I have yet to encounter an Indian person who went to school who did not learn English.
Many schools only teach in the vernacular. Many schools introduce English in the fifth grade. And most of the fluency of English is dismissible.
That is an incredibly sweeping generalisation of the whole country. Do you have figures for that? Or indeed any evidence. Or are you, like Mitra, caught up in this whole scam somewhere. By the way what do you do for a living? Because it sounds awfully like you spend your time promoting Mitra.
And it is ludicrous to assume that three generations of Tamilians in a tiny village know enough English to teach their youngsters. The ignorance here is laughable.
What is actually laughable is that many of my family come from small villages and have both learnt and taught their children English. It was not a tiny village – simple one that was in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Again could you actually state that no chid in any village in Tamil Nadar is taught English? Have you ever learnt to speak a foreign language written in a script completely different to your own? If not try to read pages of the Internet in Greek or Russian and see how much you learn in a short space of time. The most likely scenario is that the children already knew enough English to be able to read and learn in it from the internet.
You unfortunately have neither understood the experiment nor its cultural context.
Oh I have done both – you are obviously a deluded supporter of Mitra otherwise you would be able to see the completely flawed research he has undertaken, including the fact that he never checked whether the children using the computers were actually living in slums or that the children in the Tamil village had learnt English prior to his experiment. These are fundamental issues with any conclusions that can be derived from his ‘research’.
He is simply a rich man with connections who has been given air time because of the West’s ignorance of India and they are more than willing to believe ludicrous claims. He is in the end a privileged man who has many connections in the computer industry who is pushing to use technology based on flimsy claims which even a cursory glance at would be seen as shockingly woeful. In no other field of research, including computing, would he be given the time or the space. It says something about the farcical state of education research across the world that he has.
And Tom Bennett’s article is a sour rant at the best.
No it is fair enough to question claims based on so little evidence and when the evidence presented is flimsy. If you would like to comment on his piece or write a rebuttal please do so. This is just an ad hominem attack. Tom Bennett has no need to write a sour rant of any sort.
A critique to any experiment or method is essential but kindly base it on some solid ground. And oh, I am an Indian.
The experiments were poorly designed, the evidence consists of Mitra’s exaggerations and not actual statistical evidence, or even accounts from the participants themselves. The impact that Mitra claims has not at any time been demonstrated. He is however a great self-publicist.
By the way being Indian does not make your statements any truer simply that you live there and will believe, it would appear, anything including a charlatan like Mitra. India has produced many intelligent people and will continue to do so, I would rather read about them thanks.