A hole in a slum wall taught children English with no teacher on either side
On a January morning in 1999, a computer scientist ran an experiment by simply walking away from it.
On January 26, 1999, in the Kalkaji slum in New Delhi, computer scientist Sugata Mitra had his team cut a hole through a wall separating his company's office from the adjoining neighborhood, and set an internet-connected computer into the gap at child height, with no instructions attached and no adult supervising it. Then his team left it alone and watched, from a distance, what happened.
Children who had never touched a computer, many with no formal schooling and little English, figured out how to use it — browsing, drawing, eventually navigating and searching — within days, teaching each other faster than any single child learned alone. Mitra later reported that the children went on to pick up enough English to operate the machine, and some outperformed older students on unrelated tests, purely from unsupervised tinkering and peer teaching.
Mitra called the result minimally invasive education, and turned it into a model — since replicated across India and several African countries — built on a hypothesis that sounds almost too simple to be radical: put an interesting problem where children can reach it, and a group of them will often teach themselves and each other faster than a single instructor would have taught any one of them.
No curriculum was involved. No teacher stood at the front. The wall itself, briefly, was the whole school.