‘Hole in the Wall’ Wins Indian Educator $1 Million TED Prize

Sascha Baumann/Getty Images Sugata Mitra at a conference in Munich, Germany, in this June 30, 2011 photo.

Sugata Mitra, an Indian education innovator, was awarded the first $1 million TED Prize for what the global organization called his “innovative and bold efforts towards advancing learning for children.”

“Sugata and his colleagues carried out experiments for over 13 years on the nature of self-organized learning, its extent, how it works and the role of adults in encouraging it,” said TED, which announced the award atits influential annual conference of ideas in Long Beach, California, on Tuesday.

Mr. Mitra, along with his colleagues, dug a hole in a wall bordering a slum in New Delhi in 1999, installed a computer connected to the Internet and left it there, to demonstrate how kids can learn almost anything by themselves. He has spoken frequently on the need to improve the way children are educated.

Mr. Mitra said in a statement posted on the TED Web site that he would use the prize money to build the “School in the Cloud,” a learning lab in India, where children can engage with information and mentors online.

“My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together,” he said.

“Our current definition of education is to produce individuals who can fit into a bureaucratic machine,” Mr. Mitra told Forbes. “The result is a society that creates identical factory workers. The day of the factory is done.”

He has also underscored the power of cloud computing to revamp the way children learn.

In Mr. Mitra’s closing remarks while accepting the TED Prize, he shared an anecdote: “A little girl was following me around. I said, ‘I want to give a computer to everyone,’” recalls Mitra. “She reached out her hand and she said to me, ‘Get on with it.’”