Sugata Mitra Quotes

Schools should be places to learn, not to teach.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

The elements of instruction should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion.

The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.

My aim in homeschooling is to give my children the ability to be an adult learner, a skill set that will last the rest of their lives.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

I don't mind children cribbing answers off other children. It's one of the ways they can learn. I also don't think there should be too many constraints on what they can look at on the Internet.

By looking at the questions the kids are asking, we learn the scope of what needs to be done.

We've been doing this here since 1968, so we have been identified as an example of a free, democratic school, and many professors want to expose their students to our philosophy.

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.

Education must be aimed at creating a wider imagination in the child, not at suppressing. The child's mind must be set free.

Working with children is very different than the way in which I work with adults. One has to work just as much with children as with adults, but the manner of work is very different. I never tell the children the actual truth of the thing that I want them to act.

It is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method... I have studied the child; I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it, and that is what is called the Montessori Method.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children

Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.

Our great mistake in education is ... the worship of book-learning-the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. ... We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children-to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavour to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts.

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.

There should be no element of slavery in learning. Enforced exercise does no harm to the body, but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children's lessons take the form of play.

Education is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the ability to find it.

The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.

I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education.

I'm not a fan of technology . I'm a fan of pedagogy, of understanding how people learn and the most effective learning methods. But technology enables some exciting changes.

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.