 Well, good day. We are here at PCF 9 at the iconic Murray Field Stadium, talking about highest quality education and equity and inclusion for people all around the world, with the illustrious Professor Mitra. Professor Mitra, you've had what might be described as an incredible career, impacting youth and economies literally around the globe. I wonder if you could share with us what you consider to be your proudest contribution within that environment. Well, first of all, I should make it clear that these effects that you're talking about were not intentional. I hate to say this. That's fantastic. What an amazing fact. I wish I could have said that I planned it all. I was just trying to answer a few questions. And the answers turned out to be interesting. I think mainly because of the timing. 1999-2000 was when the internet was coming of age. And it was the time to look at what children might do with the internet. And that's how I had started this entire work. But in answer to your question, what makes me feel happy as an achievement or as something good is an increasing awareness of the child as an efficient learner who does not perhaps need the kind of scaffolding that we thought he or she needed. That makes me happy. That's fantastic. And I reflect on a couple of conversations that we've been able to have around PCF 9 over the last couple of days and just talking about the creativity of a child and the exploration of a child and knowing that they've got a thirst for knowledge. What is it about a child's ability to learn, in your case, talking about the hole in the wall experiment? What sparked that idea and what were some of your most incredible kind of discoveries around that elasticity of a child learning? Well, when I did the experiment in 1999, the question that I asked myself was actually a very simple one, which is what would children do if they were confronted with the internet? And you must remember that in 1999, many people didn't even know what the internet was, even what happens when you meet it. So I wanted to find out what would happen if children met the internet. That's all. What was interesting about the answer and perhaps the most interesting part of this entire journey of the last 20 years was not so much that the children can figure things out, but that they figure things out in groups better than they can by themselves. That took me by surprise. What is this about groups that makes this kind of an amplified ability as though the group was acting like a super intelligent child? It took me many years, I was stupid not to realize that the mechanism actually is as old as nature itself. A flock of murmur-eating birds is bigger than the hole. A hurricane is not caused by anything, it makes itself. Now, these things are staring at us all the time, but when it comes to children, we think that we need to shape a child like porcidine, you know, we are the potters and the other clay, they're not. They can build themselves like a hurricane can. What an interesting analogy and I think about as you're kind of highlighting it, as educators, we tend to start placing assumptions around, you know, the best way that people come to learn and whether that'll be done as an individual or as a group. If taking what you've discovered through that process of coming to see how children learn and they can do it through self-discovery and they can do it as a group, if you were to provide advice to policymakers from around the world, what would be some of the key elements of the advice that you would give, you know what you know through your work? Well, at this point in time, and I'm stressed that such advice in today's environment actually changes from time to time, you know, because of the nature of the world and how things change. At this point in time, the end of 2019, I would say we must focus our attention on the examination system on assessment. We are not assessing right. To give you an example, if I was a dentist and I wanted to hire a dentist's assistant and a young woman appeared with a GCSE A level certificate which said that she had an A plus in mathematics. She has an A in English literature and she has a B in geography. How is that helping me to decide if she'll make a good dentist's assistant? So it doesn't. Increasingly, employers don't look at that piece of paper anymore. What do they look at? Is she a functioning homo sapiens first for who? Can she speak? Does she listen properly? Can she comprehend? So I made a rule of three C's instead of the three Rs. Communication, comprehension and computing. I think for whatever purpose we employ young people, we look for these three things. Can they comprehend? Can they communicate? And can they use a computer? If that is so, then what is it in the exam system that tests for these three things? And I noticed to my horror that almost nothing does and he doesn't say anything about these three things. So I'm not surprised that the top companies of the world right now, Google or Facebook or whoever, they don't ask you for your degree anymore. Not because they think your degree doesn't contain certain parameters about your knowledge in certain subjects, except that they don't think that knowledge is of any use to them anymore. We as educators there, for me to change our focus what should we examine? But it could be said that over time, the higher education field has adapted the needs of society. And one might argue, I think as you're pointing out, the needs of society are changing more rapidly now than they ever have over our history. And you highlighted your work in the late 90s around when the internet was coming of age, right? And I think back to the dial-up modems and that sound we used to just think about more. How do you see the interaction between technology and the human going into the future, knowing that technological innovations are just continually accelerating and the human's ability to adapt to that technology. How do you see those two playing off of each other well into the future in the state of life? Yeah, well, there are two ways I could try to answer this. One is of course the gadgets way, the things way. I could say memories will get shorter, processes will get faster. I won't because those things are very easy to predict at this point. I mean, that's pure engineering. You can draw a graph and say it's going to go there next. I think the biggest change from where tomorrow is going to appear, the technology of tomorrow, the ways of living, the way of everything of tomorrow is a subject, has a long name, complex dynamical systems, right? This is the physics of tomorrow. It's basically what happens when lots of things are connected to each other. When the change in one thing changes many others and the change in those things changes the thing that caused the change in the first place. That's how tornadoes happen. That's how birds flock. That's how bees make the eyes. We, well, that's the physics of tomorrow. And just as the physics of the early 19th century shaped our world right now, from nuclear weapons to thermodynamics to power engines to everything, it's this physics that's going to shape the new world. You can see signs of it. Every time you turn on your Google Maps and you say, hey, how did it know that? What you're really reacting to is a complex dynamical system. It's, I think, very far-sighted of Google to have figured that you need simple pieces of information connected together to form a wow effect. And many of us are beginning to grasp that that is the way. So I'm not going to go into the complexities of technology tomorrow, but what I'm going to say is that the biggest and the strangest of the technologies to come will come from the science of interconnectedness, what is otherwise called complex dynamical system. So if I was to say to a body that's making curriculum, say, take the curriculum in science and put complex dynamical systems right up at the top, teach it from children of eight years old. Okay. Well, I find it just incredibly intriguing. When you talked about complex dynamical systems and you used tornadoes, an example, or flocks of birds or beehives, you consider these are, in many respects, natural laws of nature. And so the ability of humans to recognize that some of the most fundamental progressions in our immediate future have actually been around since the dawn of time, which is it's kind of a neat twist. But if I can, I'm going to just shift us just slightly. If I think back to 1999 and the hole in the wall experiment that you started, I mean, you were very purposeful in putting that experiment into an underprivileged and underrepresented neighborhood. I think it's fair to say that across the Commonwealth, there are many neighborhoods that are going to share characteristics of that where the youth don't have a chance to truly engage in learning. And you talk about trying to introduce complex dynamical systems at the age of eight. How do you see our ability on a global scale to truly raise that access? How can we replicate on scale what you've accomplished through the hole in the wall experiment to be able to reach those youth that may not otherwise have a chance to take part in education? But actually, I have a very optimistic answer. We don't have to do very much. This problem is solving itself. Whoever doesn't have a smartphone will have one. Okay, I think that's amply evident. I travel a lot all over the world and particularly remote areas of India. Every year, I see more people with access to the internet to be great smartphones, secondhand, thirdhand, $5 phones, whatever. But the glorious thing about semiconductor industry is that the chip you have inside your phone that the guy in the Sundarbans jungle has inside his phone, they're both $2 and they're both the same. So, thank God for that. So, we can take it for granted that children will have access to the internet all the time, 24 by 7 like everybody does. If they don't have it now, they will have it in the next few months, in the next few years. I'm not worried about that. What I'm worried about is what are they going to do with it? What do they need to know so that we're not scared that they have the internet? Well, to sound like a broken record, we just need to know three things. Can they comprehend? Can they communicate? And can they handle the internet? Can they figure out what's fake and what's not? If they have these three things, I would take a group of children and say figure it out on your own. That's an incredibly intriguing idea that I think, you know, as you highlight, the cellular technology is becoming more and more prolific. So, the connectivity challenge is decreasing, but you're highlighting on, you know, a world in which information has been liberated and commoditized, you know, outside of a lot of the scientific research. I like your insights on the ability to comprehend what's in front of them, you know, in terms of whether or not it's authentic information or information that's actually sought to create a problem or a further divide. But the idea of turning a cell phone over to a group of children and saying figure it out, I mean, that's an incredible concept just based on that creativity of our youth. So, well, Professor Mitra, we've had a good deal of time here to interact and like any other place. Again, you've got such an incredible history and an incredible career. I'm afraid I haven't asked the question you wanted me to ask. So, I'm wondering, is there anything that you want to share with me that we haven't gotten through? Well, you know, as it must be obvious from to you by now, the two things are almost in my mind, the assessment system, assessing the wrong things and self-organizing systems, connected systems, children and the internet. There is only one thing I want to add to that and perhaps it's a little off the topic, but I do want to mention it. We have a problem with the definition of two words right now and it's causing a lot of trouble into it. The two words are abnormal and unnatural. Interesting. They mean different things. Unnatural is actually an impossible word. An impossible word. What does unnatural mean? It means it doesn't exist in nature. It doesn't exist in nature. It doesn't exist at all as far as we know. Okay, interesting. Okay. So, there's nothing called unnatural. Anything that you can observe, anything that exists has to be about nature. You may not understand where it came from, but it is about nature. On the other hand, normal is a statistical word. You should have learnt it in school. Normal means average. Abnormal means that which is off the average. So, we mix up the two and if you take a child and say to a child who is abnormal, meaning he's either better or worse than the mean, if you say to that child, she is unnatural, making a big mistake. Okay. I'm not going to push this very much further. I just wanted to leave this with whoever is watching this program. Tell those two words in your mind and figure out the difference. Unnatural versus abnormal. What an interesting insight to close on and Professor Mitra, I can't thank you enough for the contributions you've made, not only to the academy, to learning around the world, but also to us here at PCF9. From Murrayfield Stadium, it's certainly the rugby icon of Scotland and a brilliant place to be, to be able to share ideas, best practices and truly create a difference going forward. So, for all of that, Professor Mitra, thank you so very much. Thank you, Dr. Vasiden. Thank you.