 You know, I mean, you heard this where I'm coming from, to some extent, from the intro. It's somewhat embarrassing for me, the intro, because people describe what I've done in two different ways. The good description I've had to date is when somebody called me the Gorbachev of education. But the one that I think is more accurate is another one which I heard down in Australia, which was, I was described as the Tarzan of education. So why is it that way? Because firstly, I have absolutely no formal knowledge of education at all. I never studied it as a subject. And I studied physics. Having said that, there was an interesting connection that might interest you. My father was in education, and he did his PhD in Chicago under a very famous man, Benjamin Bloom, in the times when people used to talk about objective-driven education. At the end of this lesson, you will be able to do the following. And then we test for that. And if you are able to do the following, then it's done that bit. So not that I had any interest in that, because that's what my father used to do with Bloom. And there used to be this string of rather peculiar characters who used to come to our house. And I had no clue who these people were, except that every so often my father would say, you must really meet this person. His name is Adler, or things like that. And that kind of thing. And I was like five or six years old. So then I went on, and I decided that I would do anything but whatever my father does. So I did physics. I did theoretical physics. We were as far away from there as it could possibly go. And then I will describe to you what happened because somehow I stumbled back into education. And the way it happened was that I did my physics. I got my PhD. I came out as working as an engineer. My boss said, you've got a PhD. You really ought to teach other people how to write computer programs. In those days, physicists were the only people who knew how to write computer programs. So I just teach that. And so now for the first time, I had to teach somebody. So I said, well, this is simple. I'll just write on the blackboard. I'll do whatever teachers do and teach them. It went all right, except that I had this very plush office in Delhi, and just outside was a slum. And I used to think I'm trying to make rich people's children into good quality programmers. But how many good ones am I missing back there, the ones who we don't care about? And I think you'll agree that that problem is not just an Indian problem. It's increasingly a global problem. What about them? And how many kids are we missing who might have changed the world if we knew how to do it? So it used to trouble me a great deal. And I didn't know what to do about it. And I said, I used to think to myself, well, I'm not a social changer or anything like that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy a computer and give it to them. And people said, well, for what for? They wouldn't know what to do with it. They'll probably break it, or they'll sell it off. So I said, no, I want to see what happens. So I gave it to them. And is that the quicker? And what happened, I'll come to very shortly. So now here's my take on education, first of all. Everybody knows what that is, which is unfortunate. If I showed you a piece of modern physics, everybody wouldn't know what that is. They would know the old one. But how come we know that exactly? So I started tracing back to one of the things that is funny about this picture is that if I said to you, can you put a date on it? You'd put a date which is within the last 300 years somewhere, ever since photography was invented. You'd say it's somewhere that it never changed. Who decided that it should be that way? And I couldn't find any documentation anywhere. So I made it up. I said, there must be a way to figure out who invented the classroom, and why, and when. So I first started looking at when. And when took me back 3,000 or 4,000 years. Then it took me back 5,000, 6, 7,000 years. It's always the classroom. So why? I mean, we just take it for granted, this structure. Why? And this structure explained the whole thing to me, actually. It's because you want to listen to what I have to say. You're not reading what I wrote. You're not taking home a video on a stick that you can watch at home. You want me to be live and you want to listen. So I said, OK, now that gives us a first clue. This happened before there was any paper. So you had to call the fellow, whoever you wanted to learn from, and say, OK, stand here and tell us what you know. So then, how big a space could you use? It depends on what the average fellow can throw his voice at. You work out to about a room about 20 by 30. I looked up the physics of the voice, and it said 20 by 30. I said, OK, we've got the size of the room. And how many people can sit there? Well, there's simple civil engineering calculation tells you anything between 20 and 30 people. OK, so now I've got a room. I've got 20 and 30 people inside just because it's possible to speak without any aid to that many people. And for how long can a person speak continuously? Well, if you look up the medical data, more than an hour, your voice starts cracking up. So we will have one hour periods in classrooms which have between 20 and 30 people. And it's lasted for 5,000 years, just that design based on a human voice. OK, then examinations, how shall we examine? Well, obviously if it's 20 people, at the end of whatever, a month, two months, I'm going to call them individually or in a group and I'll say, tell me the answer to this. And you'll stand up and you'll tell me the answer. And if you're right, you pass. Otherwise, we do all sorts of corrective things. So that was the system until paper got invented. So when paper got invented, things started changing. Because imagine that in the oral age, if you were preparing a primary school child, you would say to the, yes, this is also important, what will that teacher say to these children in that situation of oral transmission? Sit, do not talk, pay attention, listen carefully and remember what you hear. These would have been the instructions. They are the instructions even today, OK? Sit, listen carefully, don't look towards your neighbor, et cetera. So when paper came in, what would that primary teacher have done? The primary teacher would now say, well, never mind about how you speak. In the oral examination, she would have taught the child, speak clearly, answer when you're spoken to, et cetera. She would now say, no, no, wait. That's important, but never mind that. You must have good handwriting. Because if people cannot read what you're writing. And you don't necessarily have to spend a lot of time trying to memorize. Write down carefully whatever that man is saying. So the primary teacher's attitude would have changed just because of the introduction of a single piece of technology, paper, paper and the writing instrument. So then that went on for another several thousand years until the Germans made the printing press. So now that fellow who you were calling, they say, we don't want you anymore because we've read your book. So why do I want you now? So now the teachers had to quickly reconfigure and say, no, you don't need me to talk all the time. But you do need someone to tell you which books to read. So I will tell you which books you have to read. Because books don't tell you what's in them until you read them. Well, now jump to today. And books are no longer physical objects. They do say what's inside them quite easily. And they do one more thing. They point to each other. So like the teacher who would say, read this book first and then read that one. So you don't need that because the books now point to each other. And if you know how to follow the track. So it kind of gives us this 5,000 years of history. It tells us quite easily what we should be doing. We need to be able to tell children in that hugely pointing to each other information space how to go from one point to another. What's the efficient way to do it? Unfortunately, most of us don't know it ourselves. So we have to find a way to teach ourselves. So it reflects on all sorts of things, teacher training, approach, and so on. Another mystery in particularly primary education. So we saw the introduction of technology changed things. Did our forefathers 1,000 years ago or 500 years ago, did they say that assistive technology should not be given? I found to my surprise, they said just the opposite. They said use straight edge rulers, use protractors, use set squares, use compasses. In other words, use everything that they use to do their engineering and their measurement inside the examination hall and then show us that you can solve problems. Somewhere along the line, oh, they went further. They said, when logarithm tables came in, they said use logarithm tables, use slide rules. They never said assistive technology should not be allowed. So why did we at a certain point in time decide that this is it? After this, no more technology. So you cannot bring your tablet phone into the examination hall. You cannot bring the internet into the examination hall. So I wonder now that if we could go back 500 years to those forefathers and explain to them, wouldn't they have said, why are you doing that? Why are you not allowing them to use the tools that they will use in life inside the examination hall? If you just construct a world where examination halls allow the use of the internet, it will cause, according to me, the same change to teaching as the introduction of paper did because the examiner, the way you write questions, it will have to change. There's no point in asking a factual question which Bing or Google can tell you in a second. So you have to ask a different question, et cetera. So let's take a look at some of that. You're familiar with this, children marching, for whom? It took this picture, actually, in a school in India. I asked the school principal, who are the marching for? I mean, George, the fifth, the sixth, or which one? And he said, no, no, no, they're all gone. I said, but why are the marching then? I mean, are they all going to go to the army or what? Who are they going to fight? So he didn't have an answer, but he saw the point, I think. You've seen this. This is quite familiar. In my time, it used to be called a tired child. Today, it's a child with ADHD who is to be medicated immediately. I cannot believe that. I can't even begin to understand how you can go and medicate that girl so that she'll wake up like a robot and start reading her book. And what point is there in doing that? Why would we not ask the question, why is she sleeping? And the answer will be not with her. Nothing to do with her brain. The answer will be with us, the things that we do. In an American meeting, I said, I had ended this bit by saying, therefore, we should be medicated. But the Americans said, no, then leave that one out. So I made a little list of things that we know. This is one piece first. It's difficult to get good teachers to remote places. I have a little experiment, published experiment. This is Indian data, science, mathematics, and English scores in primary schools as you go further and further away from New Delhi into rural India. And you see the downward graph. What's the reason? I went to the establishment to ask the admin people. And you won't believe this. And lucky, there's no Indian apart from me in this room. One of them actually in private said, you know, they get more stupid as they get more rural. So I said, you can't believe that you can't say that. There's no data which supports that. So I went to find what the reason was. And I found it with just one question. The question to the teacher, would you like to work somewhere else? As you go from to in Delhi, they said, no, it's fine. It's a nice big city. You've got good health care, good entertainment, good everything. The suburbs, no, we don't want to go anywhere. It's even better. I mean, we don't have the traffic jams of Delhi, but we have, Delhi is only 10 miles away. You go a little bit further and say, yeah, it's a bit of a drive. It's 45 minutes to Delhi. I wouldn't mind going a little bit up close. 100 kilometers away, I said, yes, I'm trying to get a job in Delhi if I can. 200 kilometers away, anywhere but here. So it's a geographic remoteness and teacher migration. And then when I went back to the Department of Education, they grudgingly said, yes, teachers migrate away. The good ones migrate away. I mean, if teachers try to migrate, obviously the good ones succeed. So what are we going to do about it? I asked the government. The government said, we will do teacher training to level the playing field. We'll make the poorer teachers better. So I said, you take a teacher over here, 250 kilometers from Delhi, and you train her. And she becomes a really good teacher. What do you think she'll do next? Get a job in Delhi. So that's not going to solve your problem anyway. So teacher training is not a solution to remoteness. When I came to England, then I thought, OK, I'm not going to see this problem. Here's a developed economy. So obviously the rural areas just as developed as the urban ones, some people actually prefer living there. And when I looked at the GCSE scores, the school living certificate scores, there was no obvious geographic correlation. But there were some good ones and bad ones. So I started looking for what's the reason for that. And I found the correlation. In England, the GCSE scores, if I plot them against a peculiar number, the density of council housing, council housing for poor people, for alcoholics, the density of that, the places where there are lots of them and places where there are not so many. And you get the same graph as in India. I started going to those places to look at what they look like. And it was obvious what the reasons were. There were drug problems there. There was graffiti on the walls, dirt on the floor. Why would a good teacher with little children perhaps want to teach there? So I started talking to the teachers. And apart from a few dedicated ones, I got the same answer as in India. So yeah, it's not very safe. And that's one factor because of which I'd like to move to the posh areas. So this is a social problem. And it's there, I think, in every single country. I studied it in the United States. It's there in the inner city ghettos. It's there in the deserts. It's there high up in the mountains. And it causes a rift in society. And it causes the rift which all of us know, which is that the rich people in the nice places do better and the poor people in the not so nice places who feed the rich people in the nice places, they do badly. So I published all of that. And I did an experiment, which you just heard. So I won't go into that in a great deal of detail, but it basically was exposing children to a computer because of a very simple reason. Computers don't care where they are. They will work the same way in a remote place as they would. So if I can keep them running in a remote place, and that's easier said than done, then they will work the same way. And I found quickly that children can teach themselves how to use it. Even though they don't know the language, they've never seen it before and so on. So groups of children can learn to use the internet on their own. This is a 14-year-old result. At that time, people didn't think that this was possible. So they wanted a lot of data because they said, you know, children will only waste time with a computer if unsupervised by playing games. I wanted to see if this is true. And the actual truth of the matter was that it is not true. Provided the computer is in a public space and it is unsupervised. These are very important factors. A child alone with a computer will repeatedly play the same game over and over again. If there are a group of children and somebody tries to do that, the rest of the children immediately say, don't waste time. We want to do other things on it. So there is a good, high variety of games. Even that doesn't help. After a while, they get bored of that and they start looking for things. They start looking for all sorts of things, including something like this, a seven-year-old, a group of seven-year-olds, looking for the word arthritis. So what are you looking for? No, we're trying to figure out if they'll get a pill. So why do you want a pill for arthritis? This means grandpa has a problem, you see. So then I said, yes, they do want to help, except that we never let them. We think, we'll say, no, you can't do this. When you grow up, you'll find out all this. If I remove those factors, in other words, if I remove the adult, the child is different. I don't see them falling asleep. I don't see any ADHD. I see a lot of energy. But more about that in a moment. But here's just a glimpse from the experiment that eventually got called the hole in the wall. This was the first day, you can see these girls scratching their head, wondering what it is, because this is back in 1999. And then after a few hours, they would start to teach each other how to browse. So how on earth are they doing that? And they said, you know, there's an arrow in this and you can move the arrow with your finger. I said, all right, I figured out the cursor. The arrow pointing. So what I said. And then they said, the arrow turns into a hand at certain points. So I said, okay, that's very good. You figured that one out. And so then what happens? And I said, then you have to hit the pad. You have to hit it like that so that the hand can touch. That's in Hindi, so the hand can touch that, you know, the hotspot. And I said, and then, and then I couldn't understand what they said because they said, and then Shiva plays his drum. So I said, Shiva was an old Hindu God. So Shiva plays his drum. I mean, you can hear it. No, no, no, you can see it. I'll show you. He said, he moved it to a hotspot and he hit it. And the hourglass started. Hourglass is an unknown symbol in India but Shiva does have a drum and it looks like an hourglass and he plays it like that. So I said, okay, so Shiva plays the drum and then what happens? So whenever Shiva plays the drum, something else will happen. But you have to wait. So they've gotten to the fundamentals of the operating system using a mythology that they've created for themselves. And I thought to myself, why not? Isn't this what PRJ said children should do? So they've done it with a big piece of equipment. So good for them. I measured this whole process over a nine month period and in those days the result we found was the groups of children left unsupervised with a computer. Well, in a period of nine months, get the same computing literacy as the average office secretary in the West. Okay, word processing, the spreadsheets, this, that, the other thing. Unbelievable, but people used to come from all over the world to see this and always they used to ask, are you sure nobody taught them? And I said, no, they taught themselves. And it's a process we don't use much. So I published all that, that's also published. We know that groups of children can learn most things on their own. Now that's a big, big thing to say, but I'll tell you why I'm saying it. We did lots of experiments in those days. First of all, we measured their computer skills, which I showed you, that was a clear illustration. Then some of my colleagues started measuring mathematics, simply by pointing them towards little math sites. And the math scores started changing. I did an experiment on improving English pronunciation using text to speech. It's really simple, you know. I think in the EU that could easily be a usable thing, which is that you speak to a computer and you have a little program, which, I mean, you can buy it commercially, which types out what you're saying. What you do is you make a child read a paragraph and you see what the computer typed and you subtract the correct, you find out how many errors there are, and then you just tell the children, speak, do whatever you have to do so that the computer understands everything that you're saying. So I did this in Hyderabad in India and there was a remarkable change in their pronunciation as they, by trial and error, removed all the errors. So the speech-to-text acts as an examiner, basically, and they like that because it's not human. Finally, I came to England and a lot of people ask me, why did, after all these years in India, why did you come to England? Well, the answer is nothing mysterious. It's an answer which drives all of us researchers to various places, money. So there's a large, several million pounds worth of research money came into Newcastle University to improve the quality of education in poorer parts of India. So they called me and said, you're the man who should be doing this. So anyway, my son had grown up and everything so we sort of packed our bags and said, okay, let's do it. And went over here to England. In England, the reaction to all of this was, it's very fascinating, but you're overstating it. When you say children can learn anything by themselves. So I designed an experiment which would change my life completely. At that time, the experiment was designed to fail. I said, I'm gonna do an experiment where they don't succeed. And that will establish the limits. So the experiment I made was can 12-year-old Tamil-speaking Indian children in a village, Tamil being a South Indian language, teach themselves the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a street side computer on their own. And I said, you know, I'll give them a pretest. They'll get a zero. I'll give them a post-test after some time. They'll get another zero. I'll go back to England. I'll say, we need teachers. So off I went, I found a village where they had a hole in the wall computer. The children came running. I said, what have you done? Have you brought a new game? I said, no, I've brought something very difficult. Here it is. The downloaded material on DNA replication, genetics. The children came and said, how can we understand this? You know, this has got huge English words and chemistry and this and that. I said, I don't know. That used to be and continues to be my pedagogical method. I said, I don't know how you're going to understand it. I just brought it for you and I'm going to leave now. And I left because I knew by then a sentence which I don't know how you'll react to. For all these years, I used to say, look at how clever these children are, how far they've got in spite of the fact that I wasn't there or a teacher wasn't there. I changed that to look at how far they got because we were not there, okay? Hard to take, but we have to take it. I've learned it with years and years of observation. Anyway, so in Kuppam, that was the name of the village, we did this experiment and they got a zero. Three months later, the children came back in very quiet. I said, what have you understood? Nothing. So I said, nothing at all. So when did you give up? So they said, no, we never gave up. We look at those screens all the time, trying to understand them, but it's very hard. So at that point, one little girl, luckily for me, she raised her hand and in sort of broken Tamil and English, she said, but apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else. So I said, what did you say? So that's what Kuppam looks like. There's all in the wall, computers. When I pre-tested and post-tested, then they're gone from a statistical zero to 30%. It was an educational impossibility, in a subject that they don't know, which is 20 years ahead of their time in a language, they can't speak properly in that tropical heat, outdoors without a teacher. It went against everything that the educational theory had to say, but there it was. But I couldn't go back to England with those results because in our traditional Victorian system, 30% is still a fail, so it failed. So how do I get them another 20 marks without a teacher? Couldn't find a teacher, but I found a young girl who was a good friend of theirs and I said to her, can you teach them more biotechnology? And she said, no, I didn't have science in school. I have no clue what they're doing with all those diagrams. I can't help. So I said, no, you can. What you got to do is use the method of the grandmother. So she said, what's that? And I told her my authorite story and I said that, you know, children, they want to help their grandparents. They just don't know how to say it. So what you do is you stand behind them and whenever they do anything, you admire them. You just say, how did you do that? When I was a child of your age, I was really silly. I couldn't understand anything. You know, I can see some of you nodding who know the grandmother's story. So the grandmother uses a pedagogical method which is very significantly different from the parent or the teacher. It's just that they don't voice it, but it is a highly effective method. It uses admiration to produce a spiral of learning inside children. So I asked her to do that and she did that for two months. The scores jumped to 50%, just because they wanted to hear her say that they're very clever and I published. And it became a very referenced paper because it showed the impossible happening in education. So I started experimenting all over the world. In England, well, when this got published and I was giving a lecture like this somewhere in England, a school teacher came into the university and met me and she said, it's fascinating what you're doing with all these children in remote areas. But what about us? So I said, what about you? In England, you've got good schools. What's your problem? So she said, come with me to County Durham up of northeast. I'll show you some good schools. So we went with her and God, that was such an eye-opener. I mean, those are very poor areas and they have the remoteness problem. They have a problem with alcoholism, single parents and all kinds. I began to see the West's problems for the first time to see that, okay, there's a whole new world out there which I didn't know anything about and the children are the main sufferers of that. So I went into the school and I started. I said, I will bring you the hole in the wall experiment upside down inside the school. We called it a self-organized learning environment. So what you do is you go into a classroom, it's very simple, you take away the computers, leave just one or two, ask the children some really difficult question and then leave them alone. So they have to do what the children in the hole in the wall do, which is they have to cluster around each other and so on and so forth and they produce some amazing results. So I did this sort of all over, this is in Hong Kong, China and so on and came to the conclusion, which I told you just earlier in the slide, that groups of children have the potential and the capability to teach themselves anything in today's world by themselves. It doesn't matter how many years ahead of their time you ask them to do, provided you make the question right. So I'll just give you an example because this part is very, very important. You can also do it wrong and it won't work. Seven year olds in a London school, the teacher says to Gata, I'm going to tell you to do something which you will never succeed in because the subject I have to teach today is the most boring on the planet. I said, what's that? It's gum health for seven year olds. So I said, okay, I'll take it on. So when this is a group of seven year olds, so first thing I said was, okay, how many people have shaking teeth? So you know, seven year olds, I've got two, I've got one and so on. Okay, so I said, you know what? When you were born, did you have any teeth? No, no, we don't have teeth when we were born. Okay, then what happens? We grow teeth. And then I said, you know, something very funny happens, the teeth fall out, I said, yeah. And then they grow back, yeah. And then they last for 40, 50, 60 years and then they fall out again and they never come back. Now I've got them, okay. Yeah, they never come back. So I said, yes, the question is, why does that happen? Why does it come back the first time? Don't come back the second time. Okay, so they worked on it, they figured out everything 40 minutes later. It's usually 40 minutes. Then they present in group, I call it a conference, I say, okay, what are the results of your research? And so the fascinating stuff, you know, milk teeth are, babies grow teeth when they need solid food in order to smash it up. But the solid food that babies eat is soft food. So they need little teeth and not very strong to process that. When they, in their words, as they grow up and their stomachs become bigger, they need bigger and harder food. Now those little teeth can no longer take, chew that kind of food. So they fall off and big, strong teeth come out. And I said, okay, and then? And then years and years passed. We eat all our food and everything. And the gums start to get loose with all that chewing. And now the teeth fall out, but the new ones can't grow because the gums are too loose now to hold them. Fascinating stuff. So at the end of it, I said, so guess what? If there was a way to keep the gums firm for a little longer, the teeth would last a little longer. And I'm waiting with my fingers crossed and they said, yes. So then I said to the teacher, well, go ahead, gum health now. They do gum health for the next three hours. You know? Because they know what they're talking about. It's what they have found. It's not what I have told them and so on. So if you put that together, if you put the self-organized learning environment along with the kuppam result that a granny method can improve the performance, you can also see that grannies can be beamed. In England, I put out an appeal once to say if you're a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time every week for free? In the first two weeks, I got 200. I know more British grandmothers than anybody else. Okay? So they're called the granny cloud. And within that, there is a workforce that was being totally wasted. 40 years of experience, 30 years of experience, sitting in a little village knitting. So I take them and using Skype, I beam them into the schools where good teachers will not go. And the children love their Skype grannies. They appear full-size on the wall and they talk to them. So, and they do it for free. Because it's only one hour a week. I have enough of them to do it with and it changes their lives actually. That's what I didn't expect. They said, you know, you think their lives are changing? It's our lives are changing. So, and they have so many stories. Just the other day, one of them said, I prepared for an hour. I had such a lovely story to read to these children, children in Hyderabad, India in a slum. So I said, then what happened? They said, are you talking with your laptop? I said, yes. So they said, in that case, get up, take the laptop and show us what's in your fridge. So, she said, I spent my one hour discussing Tesco. And, but that's the kind of, it's so rich, you know? Incredible. So that's what it looks like. Okay, the granny cloud is 5,000 miles apart. So that's all the published stuff. Now comes the harder bits. So we know these things. We just revisit. We know that children can tease themselves to use the internet. We know they can tease themselves, almost anything by themselves. We know that given a granny, this process is amplified. We don't know if children can learn to read by themselves. And this is very crucial because for this whole method to work, they must be able to read and understand. How quickly can we reach that goal? I started looking for the numbers and discovered that it's in a pathetic condition. Country after country is saying, reading comprehension is very poor. Children are reading below their reading ages. Why is that? I don't know. At the same time, you find two and a half year olds are handling iPads. Wherever I go, I find people telling stories about, oh, my little granddaughter has changed my wallpaper on my phone or something like that. And how are they doing this? I think there's a different kind of literacy that we've missed somewhere. And we don't have a name for it. Just to give you a quick example, I have a grand niece who was downloading. She very excitedly told me that I have downloaded an app. I said, look, is that your mother's iPad? Yes, but don't do that because it costs her money. So she said, no, it's free. So she's two or two and some months. So I said, how do you know it's free? So she points to the box, she's illiterate. She says, in this box, if there are no number, number things, then it means it's free, okay? It's some kind of functional reading, which we don't know anything about, but she's reading, okay? So can they learn to read by themselves? I don't know. But I did another study, I did this in Uruguay. Uruguay is interesting because there is no child in Uruguay who doesn't have a laptop, okay? It's a small country. Every single child has had one for five years. So Uruguay called me and said, can you tell us, has anything happened? Can we justify this expenditure? So I did a measurement and discovered very quickly that in Uruguay, the children were reading better in Spanish and English than their counterparts in all the neighboring countries, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and the United States on national average scores. So why? And then it struck me, well, if a child is constantly reading things off a computer and nobody is telling him whether this is meant for his age or not, isn't it obvious that they're reading comprehension will go up? I'm experimenting with that. And the findings are that doing all this in groups is absolutely key to the whole process. Alone, they'll just say, this is too difficult and leave it. In groups, they can read higher than their individual levels. But I have to do these measurements better now. The second thing we don't know is if children can search accurately by themselves. What if they land themselves in trouble? What I have found is very hopeful that when children work in groups, if the groups are allowed to interact with each other and talk freely, if the adult is not there, they can detect doctrine from actual, serious material. I don't know how they do it. So I think the sum total of what I've found in these 14 years is that the metacognitive skills of a group are way above the individual levels, way, way above. And that in the subject which I know is called a self-organizing system. That's what a physicist would call it. Hence the conclusion that what we're looking at here is learning in a self-organized system. So we also know that children can do lots of things and that the age at which they do it is getting less and less. So what should we do about it? I think curricula around the world needs to be revised and should include the internet, every piece of curriculum, somehow. Take a look at this one, the British National Curriculum. And one of these points, pupils should be taught to recognize that the past represented and interpreted in different ways and to give reasons for this. Can you imagine explaining this to an eight-year-old? I mean, he's going to fall asleep, okay? Instead of that, in a soul, what I did actually is convert this point into this question. In a museum in the Indian city of Mathura, there is a statue of the great emperor Kanishka. Who was he and why is his head missing? You know, eight-year-olds love missing heads. Okay? And the answer to this question is that bit of curriculum, that history can be interpreted differently by different people. Okay, so why not convert a curriculum into big, important, interesting questions? We know that young people are like this and we don't like it. The first bit I can understand that, yes, we all say, we've all seen this. We've seen this in malls, we've seen this in trains, buses. But the second bit, we don't like it. Why? Why don't we like it? And what if they were to say, we don't like you? Then what is that a problem? So why do we not like it? Because we think that they're wasting time and we think they're being antisocial. I started asking my adult friends, do you know, do you have data on what they do on those phones when they keep staring at it? And nobody did. Everybody was guessing. Everybody said they're texting all the time. They sit next to each other, their best friend and both of them are texting away at somebody else. This is awful. I said, do you know? And nobody did. So I did a terribly rude thing the last three months. I sat behind them and I looked at what they were doing. You know, I know it's terrible, but somebody has to do it. Otherwise, where's the data going to come from? Okay? And I saw that they don't text all the time. They search a lot. They continuously learn from these machines. When they do text, it's not any, it's not banal. I mean, sometimes it is. It's just, oh, so where are you going this evening? That sort of thing, followed by in my part of the country. Oh, I'm going to the metro center. What for? There's a new shop which is open. What's it about? These are boys texting. It's got a quadricopter. What's a quadricopter? And so on and so on. And then I see this banal conversation sliding into instruction. So what's wrong with that? We didn't have that in our youth. So why do we get annoyed when we see it now? Pedagogy needs to include the use of the internet. Not just for searching, but for talking to each other, for Facebook, Twitter, all of that needs to come into the pedagogy. We need their world to come into the classroom. We solve problems like this. We solve problems like this. When your children go out there and join an office, this is how they'll solve problems. Doesn't it remind you of the hole in the wall? So why would we not train them or encourage them to solve problems this way, collaboratively using the internet? We solve problems like this. This is most common, sitting around a table when we have a problem, we say, let's call a meeting. When we are in school and we have a problem, we say, don't look at what anybody else is doing. What is the point of that? One last little example. In a school in Newcastle, I did an experiment. I said, give me a group of children that I've never met before and don't tell me what they were going to do if I didn't come. So it turned out to be a group of 12-year-olds and they were going to do art and they were going to do Cezanne's use of light and shade in his watercolors. And I said, quite honestly, I said, I don't know a word of what this means, but I can teach you. How? You just tell the children, look, I've got a problem. Your teacher was going to do Cezanne's use of light and shade in his watercolors. I don't even know how to spell Cezanne. But I don't want to get thrown out of your school, so will you do it for me? And they did it. So I had a little film, but I'm going to skip that. However, we don't ask questions like that. We ask questions like this. This is the end of schooling. When you sit in this hall and you answer this question. Examinations need to focus on the internet and collaboration for problem solving and decision making. Example, here's a sample GCSE question. According to Darwin's theory of evolution, how do new species evolve? By artificial selection, by natural selection, by unnatural selection. I think it's the most terrible, stupid question to start with first of all. So I changed that question. I changed that question to this. Why do we have five fingers and toes on each hand? Why not any other number? Use the internet and mutual discussion to develop a paragraph on this subject. Isn't there a much more rational way to ask that question than the multiple choice, which obviously anybody who has access to the internet can solve in two seconds. But this one, it doesn't have an answer. It takes a lot of discussion. So we need to change that. Success is still defined by the ability to write nicely in a nice handwriting. We're using the correct spelling and hopefully using an obsolete device, the fountain pen. We need to change the definition of that one. So this is going to be hard, gentlemen. Handwriting, spelling, grammar, multiplication tables. We have to take each one and dispassionately see if they're required. If not, we have to check them out. And handwriting is my current target. Should people not know how to write by hand? It hurts to say it, you know. Can I say this for my own child that he will never know how to write by hand? I'll say, well, no, I'll teach him how to write by hand, but I won't bother with spending years on how good his handwriting is. That should become a hobby, like knitting. Spelling, when you have a spell checker, there's, again, my generation's misunderstanding. If you use a spell checker, you'll never learn how to spell. It's absolutely untrue, nobody's tested it. I think assistive technology teaches. You misspell a word once, twice, the third time you don't misspell it. So the assistive technology can actually teach if you allow it inside the school. Similarly for grammar, grammar checkers, multiplication tables, I mean, that takes the cake. 17 times tables, that's considered life skill. Whatever for. Why would things that a generation 200 years ago invented, who was a very clever generation, and said, one to 10 into one to 10, this table needs to be inside your head because otherwise you won't be able to do things on the spot. They were brilliant, and they would have laughed at us if we showed them a calculator and said, even now we teach your method. They would have said, are you out of your mind or what? But we decided that these are wonderful skills. If you answer examination using Shakespeare's English, you will fail. If you answer examination using texting language, you've had it. But if you answer in English in 1930s English, you are a good boy. Who's decided that year? What for, when are we gonna change that? Texting language, we hate it. Every time I try to write it and I hesitate to write it. I don't like it. And then I think to myself, we made a little gadget with an awful keyboard, and the generation we made it, we were selling it to, my generation built that and sold it to the younger generation. Instead of throwing it into the waste paper basket, they invented a new language for it. We should applaud them for doing that instead of berating them. This was the office until maybe 70 years ago. This is what an office used to look like. This is what an office used to look like with the supervisor moving up and down. And now, so you had to prepare children for these offices and you prepared them like this. Is it clear now what's wrong? We're 200 years behind. So obsolescence of ideas, skills, methods, knowledge need to be factored into learning methods, curricula, examinations. And I think the simple trick is if you start with examinations, it drives everything else. When teachers are friends, not sages, not guides, if they're just friends like the granny, then they can roll curriculum, pedagogy, and examination all together into one. We don't need to separate them. You know that question like, why do we have five fingers on our hands? It could be an examination question, it could be a curriculum, it could be knowledge, a lesson on evolution. It could be all of that rolled into one. And if teachers were friends, then schooling can be forever. Why do we need to box it between the ages of five and 18? How about a schooling system where, until the age of five, you go to school for one hour a day. Five to 12, you go for four hours a day. 12 to 18, you go for seven hours a day. And after 18, for the rest of your life, there is one day every month when you go back to school. You know, the school was fun, so why just take it away, why block it off? So I'm building something called a school in the cloud. It's a very simple thing. It looks like a cyber cafe for children. It's a teacher-less facility. There will be a human supervisor, but she doesn't teach. It's usually elderly woman who looks after health and safety. And there's a big screen. If the children want, they can get a Skypton granny. They have a whole list of which granny or which grandfather is good at what. And by the way, they're not all grannies. There's young men and women also in there. And so they can call these people. And like one child put it to me in India after a lot of coaxing. I said, why do you like this? Isn't it so much better to have a real person? Why do you like this person on the screen? And then in a very embarrassed voice, he said, you can switch them off. No. So. So I'm building them in some really remote places. I'm going to collect the data and I'm going to compare them with two schools in England where I'm building them also up in the northeastern England. And in three years' time, we'll have data on whether it's possible to roll curriculum, pedagogy, examinations into one, whether it's possible to have non-physical teachers, huge numbers of them. So a school can say that I can use 600 teachers. And where does that take the children? What does it do to their psychological health and to their performance? And TED calls them schools in the cloud. So that's it. I'm sorry, I've already taken too much time.