Adam Braun went to school in the US and now runs a nonprofit that builds schools in Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In contrast, Sugata Mitra—the winner of the 2013 TED Prize—went to school in India and now is a professor in the UK, where his research on self-directed learning routinely brings him into elementary schools. Both of these education activists have seen how typical classrooms function in the Western world, and both have seen how typical classrooms function in the developing world. And both say, the West isn’t always better.
Braun and Mitra have teamed up through Microsoft’s Work Wonders Project to bring Mitra’s School in the Cloud learning platform into Braun’s Pencils of Promise schools. As the two pilot their partnership in a school in rural Ghana, we got them together via Skype to talk through a bold question: what can the West learn from the developing world when it comes to education? Their conversation is packed with insights.
To start us off, can each of you share three lessons that the developing world can teach the developed world when it comes to education?
Adam Braun: I think that, in the developed world, we tend to assume that we have all the answers and that those will trickle down to the people at the base of the pyramid. But there’s a lot to be learned from unexpected places too. Three things that that our staff and team has observed:
- In the American education system, the teacher is usually assumed to be the expert. We have this traditional model where one teacher stands in front of 30 kids. But the act of teaching is actually one of the most valuable ways to learn. It’s nice to see environments where children can be teachers. That’s something that Sugata has really expanded on with his Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs), which a lot of times remove the teacher altogether and allow children to learn from one another and teach one another simultaneously.
- In the United States, there is the expectation that students are supposed to sit still. You’re told not to fidget and to focus. But scientific research shows that brain activity is significantly heightened after 20 minutes of physical activity. There’s significant value in what you see in the developing world—in between classes, kids run in a field, play in a river, climb a mountain. And because they don’t always have proper desks, they’re often learning while sitting on the floor or moving about in the classroom. That can actually lead to better retention and synthesis of information.
