Sugata Mitra Quotes

Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they're learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer.

When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

All learning is in the learner, not in the teacher.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It’s not about making learning happen; it’s about letting it happen.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

When you home study, you get a better education. I basically got to teach myself. Being naturally able to make my own opinions about the schoolwork I had to deal with, instead of being instructed under the tutelage of the teacher, was really nice academically.

It's not the teaching, it's the learning.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

A self-taught man usually has a poor teacher and a worse student.

I wasn't a great student. Just give me a school with no grades, and I'll be happy.

My teachers helped guide and motivate me; but the responsibility of learning was left with me, an approach to learning which was later reinforced by my experiences at Amherst.

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

Teachers have told us across the country that what's severely outdated is the teacher at the front of the classroom as the font of knowledge, because as we know, access to knowledge and information is now ubiquitous. So instead, teachers want to help students learn how to think so that they can be lifelong learners.

I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way.

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

The number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.

The most desirable mode of education, is that which is careful that all the acquisitions of the pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire . . . The boy, like the man, studies because he desires it. He proceeds upon a plan of is own invention, or by which, by adopting, he has made his own. Everything bespeaks independence and inequality.

Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

The aim of all education is, or should be, to teach people to educate themselves.