Sugata Mitra

Education prepares to be one piece of a machine.

Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.

We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhaps, their schoolwork can suffer. They need to be taught to think and study for themselves.

In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Learning is the new skill. Imagination, creation and asking new questions are at its core.

Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers.

I'm encouraging kids to use computers at their own pace to build aspirations.

Let children wander aimlessly around ideas.