Sugata Mitra Quotes

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

I think the best thing you can teach a person is how to learn. And once they discover their own individual approach to that - which is inside all of us - then all of a sudden, they've opened up a door of endless resources.

Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.

All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.

We didn't set out to be educators or even scientists, and we don't purport that what we do is real science but we're demonstrating a methodology by which one can engage and satisfy your curiosity.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

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Teachers have told us across the country that what's severely outdated is the teacher at the front of the classroom as the font of knowledge, because as we know, access to knowledge and information is now ubiquitous.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.

If you don't ask the right questions, I can't give you the answers, and if you don't know the right question to ask, you're not ready for the answers

The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.

Any man is educated who knows where to get knowledge when he needs it, and how to organize that knowledge into definite plans of action.

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.

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

My biggest asset is that I know how to learn, and that, I believe, will help me in the long run.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.

Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.

Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.

I always say I have a Socratic approach to most things that I do. I pummel people with questions, because I need to know what they're thinking, what they're trying to achieve, what they believe the final outcome is going to be.

My mother was a first-grade teacher, so I credit her with this lifelong intellectual curiosity I have, and love of reading and learning.

I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn.

Teaching can be learning, especially if student curiosity with the question 'What's going on here?' can be elicited.