Cheap tablet with network connectivity will help self motivated students to learn by themselves. I hope that access to the Internet will get rid of the incompetent teachers from their path to knowledge. Some states have taken concrete measures to get rural India connected to the Internet. Yes, there is corruption,poverty,education,health and whole lot of other problems that India needs to solve. They need not be solved in sequential order. Bringing in the politics related to Kashmir is irrelevant to this topic. Since you mentioned it, I would like to bring in another perspective. The protesters were seen as violent anti-nationals by one group and as peaceful freedom fighters by others. Unfortunately for India, the grouping was based, to a large extent, on whether one was a Hindu or a Muslim.

Based on the evidence of a good friend from Nigeria, I agree. In his school the teachers took the money and disappeared, so the students got together and taught themselves. A cheap device that can access information resources on the internet would have given them access to a lot more resources then they had at the time; and he studied for and achieved a good degree in engineering.

Disagree strongly. Take 10 year old boy or a girl, give him the cheap tablet and unlimited internet supply and now read your statement again.

"Cheap tablet with network connectivity will help self motivated students to learn by themselves"

and answer this. What is the meaning of self motivation for a 10 year old?

I was busy using my dad's telecommuting PC to dial BBSes and learn to code when I was 10. It bothers me to no end when people underestimate the capabilities of children.

What do you mean? Motivation comes from curiosity and a 10 year old has that more than most! Give him an internet connection and he can learn almost anything!

Agreed motivation comes from curiosity. But in case of 10 year old with all the distractions on the internet, can he/she or will he/she really spend enough time on Khan Academy to learn maths, science, language etc. on his own?

If that is the case then you should be force feeding the child to become something they never wanted to be. Children coming from poor families will focus their energies on learning especially when will head from likes of Bill Gates that khan academy is all you need to learn something.They will atleast get started and go for it. Sugata mitra is experiment[1] clearly demonstrate what childrens can do once they are left to their own devices.

Problem with children is not the desire to learn, problem is bad teachers who does nothing but inhibit and curb their student's creativity.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_t...

Dear sudhirc. Please read my comments. I am constantly mentioning "primary school education".

I don't give a damn about careers, I don't give a damn about degrees; because by the time people are in (senior)high school, they are smart to use the 3 pound coconut God put on their shoulders and figure things out for themselves.

All I care about primary school education. And children NEED hand holding and general direction providing at such a nascent level which can only be provided by a trained teacher within a pedagogically sound system and can never be achieved by any level of technologically marvelous device of any sorts. Period.

That is why when I have children they are not going to school until they are at least 10 years old. :P

PS: I don't care what Bill Gates says. Since when is he an authority on education? What are his credentials/contributions in the field?

I think you overestimate the difficulty in "automating" education and providing it in india. children can learn pretty well using online video - khan academy has proven that, and khan academy is even building a complete interactive educational framework.

The high cost of bandwidth can be probably solved pretty inexpensively using caching at the village level. caching is a well proven technology and is a big part of the backbone of the internet.

When you say "fix the damn schools first" you underestimate the size of the problem. this is a huge huge problem, very difficult one , maybe even unsolvable at the scale and the conditions india has. see , even rich countries that had decades to build an education system are struggling with building a high quality education system using teachers. and mostly they're not doing very well.

I think india has no choice. it has to invent a new, high quality and huge scale education system. and giving each student a tablet is a good first step to get there.

I tried showing Khan Academy videos to my cousins going to very expensive private schools where 95% curriculum is in English right from the kindergarten. Here is what I observed.

- They understood a lot from it. In some case even more than their classrooms.

- They have a lot of questions about the subject matter. Which Mr. Khan could not answer as he was present not here.

- Most of their questions were there because of the English vocabulary or the sentences my cousins could not understand.

So yes. Khan Academy is doing a great job. I am learning higher maths again now. But videos cannot replace a good teacher and English is not the native language here. Even if we wanted to translated the videos, it would still be a monumental tasks as there are about 6000 spoken languages in India.

And yes I agree with you. Not just India, whole world needs a new education system. But the a particular technology should not the foundation of it. What we need is:

- a pedagogically sound foundation

- teachers trained in the methods of teaching, not just the subject matter

- then use the technology to enable this system.

If you want to build a huge , high quality education system, it better to start with lower quality , easier to scale solution and improve it, than start with the standard education system. why ? because the rate of improvement of the cheaper system would be much faster , and with time it would be better.

So let's say you add a few improvements to the khan system: translations. and educational games that students like to use. and a way to enable students help each other and get credit for it. and a way to measure where each student is stuck so the computer can give it better/different explanations , or more exercises to practice , or ask for the teacher to help him with this subject. and maybe measure teacher performance and help train him as well , as part of his job. and ways to match educational content to the student prefered learning style. and ways to measure educational content so that the content can be improved. and probably a million of other usefull things.

So there are tons of ways to improve. and once you built some small or great improvement , with a click of a button you can deploy it, and a day later a hundred million students(or at least tens of thousands) can now learn better and faster.

Exactly my point. What we need is a system with sound pedagogical foundation, not necessarily at the scale of millions of student at first. May be start with 30 students in 1st standard in some government run school. Groom these 30 as they move up the grades. Compare contrast results every year, slowly expand the reach and improve. and bam, we have a pedagogically sound education system in 10 - 15 years.

PS: Government run schools are already shot to hell here is India.

I don't think designing a reasonable pedagogical foundation is the problem for india's public schools. you can just copy the one from a decent private school.

But can you teach it to a million teachers ? can you guarantee they will use it? can you make the teachers engaging ? are they good ? do they even come to to work ? will they take bribes for good test results ?

Can you really do all those ? those are tough challenges. india have tried to solve those for quite some time now(probably a few decades). the results are not very good. and the problem is not unique to india. even the u.s. is troubled by education.

Now compare this to the rate of improvement of technology based solutions : khan academy , based on the work of a SINGLE person which started in 2005 , now tutors tens or hundred of million people , pretty successfully and for free. even bill gates's children use it.

Challenges will always be there. Every few years there will be a different set of challenges. The point is do we give up because of these challenges. No. We keep striving. Generation after generation. That is how mankind has progressed. We need to do something similar for our education systems. Neither I say that I know how to do it nor I am saying let's do it all together. I am not sure what will work and what won't. But we(educationists + parents + government) need to pickup the ball and start doing something.

Mr. Khan doing a great job. A great service to the mankind. His contributions towards helping people learn things is almost as important as those who invent/discover the stuff in first place. It is a great tool for people to learn. But I say it again Khan Academy is not the replacement for the primary school teacher.

One thing that might work immediately is "make profit making from schools illegal".

- Every school run by a group of trustworthy people selected from society by the people whose children go to those schools.

- High salaries for the teachers but equally high accountability.

- Any surplus to be invested back into the school.

- Severe punishment by law for teachers, educationists and school managers for failing to perform duties to the best of their abilities.

Does Khan Academy have documented instances where they've replaced a teacher in the classroom with videos? From my understanding, KA currently works well as a supplement to traditional classroom education instead of simply replacing it.

I was talking about khan as an example. if you want totaly automated self learning , look for the "hole in the wall" education experiments. they sucseeded.

But i think khan academy can make the teacher job much easier, so maybe even no so good teacher can achieve good results.