Autonomy, Purpose & Mastery

Autonomy, Purpose & Mastery
Theva Nithy
There is this very important and hugely interesting experiment that was conducted in India a few years ago, called, “Hole in the wall”. Simply put, Dr. Sugata Mitra of NIIT India, placed computers and touch pads into walls all over India, stood back, and watched, recorded what happened. After replicating this experiment all over India, Dr. Mitra proposed a learning idea called Minimally Invasive Education.
“Minimally Invasive Education™ (MIE) is a solution that uses the power of collaboration and the natural curiosity of children to catalyze learning. It is defined as a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no, intervention by a teacher.”
The core idea behind MIE is that groups of children are able to learn on their own without any direct intervention from teachers. Dr. Mitra found that children using a Hole-in-the-wall Learning Station required little or no inputs from teachers and learnt on their own by the process of exploration, discovery and peer coaching. The idea of MIE has been fine-tuned over a period of time based on observations and educational experiments conducted at NIIT.
MIE uses the intrinsic motivations in children and provides an enabling, autonomous environment where they can learn on their own, thereby providing purpose leading to mastery. While experimenting with the Learning Station, children pick up critical problem solving skills. Most importantly, the learning occurs in a collaborative setting where children can share their knowledge and in the process, inherent group dynamics, and a process of self-selection, culminates in a highly organised educational environment.

Conventional pedagogy focuses on many teachers’ abilities to disseminate information in a classroom setting, where no autonomy and hopefully purpose leading to mastery might be achieved. MIE complements a formal schooling environment by providing a much needed balance for a child to learn on his own and self-selecting to move on to higher levels of wisdom and achievements..
Focused areas of the research were Academic Performance, Correlation with Educational Facilities, Comparison with Formal Computer Education, Performance of Dropouts and Peer-to-Peer Learning Patterns. (http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ )
In the Hole-in-the-wall study, Sociometric surveys were implemented to determine the composition of users and to identify the leaders. The focus was on social networking, self-regulation and collaboration, patterns of knowledge flow from key leaders (who were identified and provided with targeted input) to other children at the Learning Station.
Some of the findings of this experiment are:
• There quickly came about groups of Self-organizing children who organize themselves into Leaders (experts), Connectors and Novice groups.
• Key leaders, on receiving targeted intervention, play a key role in bringing about a “multiplier effect in learning” within the community.
We come now to the reason I am discussing this topic, the focus being Self Selection and Decision Making. This is my statement.
“We, parents and educators, are not allowing our students to become self-selecting, autonomous decision makers and thus, are not allowing them to find autonomy, purpose and mastery in a real world setting”
This statement does not call for a defense. We must surely acknowledge that the implications for my statement are causing many prominent thinkers, stakeholders and societies to be very uncomplimentary, and downright angry, over the way education is being CONDUCTED now. A conductor waves his baton and the students are expected to live, learn and breathe according to the movements of that baton.
So what is our proposal for the dynamics of a transformed education system?
The singular problem that must be addressed is a decentralised power center that makes all decisions, and one wonders if perhaps many of these decisions are based on impacts on voting trends. Current centers of power radiate out beginning at the government levels, then at the state directors’ levels, at principals’ levels and finally, the teachers’ themselves. The big picture is that in order for students to become autonomous learners, power has to be shifted to them. Autonomy HAS to be the starting point, otherwise no ownership of learning will take place and the final objectives of purpose and mastery will not happen.
Our education system and everyone else’s too, are based on standards that learners have to meet.
“No deviations young boys and girls. Listen up; we the almighty educators do not want to see or hear you. This is what you must learn, this is what you must know, and don’t try to be funny about it. We don’t give a damn if you don’t understand, just memorise it. We don’t really care if you get the meaning of it, just realise that you will be tested for this on our beautiful standardised exams. Ha, Ha, Ha…you think our exams are useless? Too bad, get A’s or you will not be placed in a good school and you can forget about scholarships!”
Wake up old people!
This is the 21st century, and technology has changed our outlooks, and I dare say it has physically changed our brains, and our thought processes. Young people want to know the “why’s” first before they make decisions. They are not interested in learning things because it is in a book - they want to know why they should be asked to do anything before they take full ownership of it. They want there to be relevance and meaning to the things they do and the knowledge they are asked to master, only then will they be willing to see the purpose of education and to then master it.
Young people want to see the impact of stuff they are asked to master. This is a generation growing up angry at their elders for destroying the world and then handing it over to them on a platter and saying, “Here you go. Do what you can to repair the world or not. Either way, it’s yours!” This is a generation growing up with the knowledge and foresight of global warming and the inevitable global flooding that will cause huge upheavals during their lifetimes.
How can they enter their classrooms with all this knowledge, and then be told to shut up and listen!?
Education has to change so that the learners and educators of the world speak a common language. It has to start with learners seeing that educators are willing to hand over the power to enable autonomous learning. Educators must ask the all-important questions, “What do you want to do? What is important to you?”
Try to see folks, that learners are not standardised. How could we possibly still be harping on a glorious undertaking of standardised education for all till Form 5 and too bad if you can’t handle it? It has already gone way past the point where we should be creating different types of education for different types of learners and yes, of course it will be difficult. Anything that is worth achieving is always difficult. Otherwise we would be doing it and would have achieved it.
The point is to create environments where students can find purpose for themselves in a rich, supportive and talent-enabling environment. So what if there are amongst these students, human beings who will never make heads or tails of science and math? They might instead become national treasures who create the greatest paintings and sculptures the world has ever known. They will learn to think along the way simply because they have become autonomous learners who found their purpose in life and have decided to master their purpose. THEY decided; not someone else making that decision for them.
In the end, I suppose we all have good intentions but pressure from above, below, sideways and every which way cause many of us to become misguided. Misguided guides and unthinking thinkers have been the cause of many avoidable disasters, and for me personally, the greatest disaster is not enabling learners who are autonomous, who have purpose and who become masters of their purpose.
Isn’t it a joke that market places and industry demand employable graduates who are wise decision makers and who are able to critically address problems and solve them, but yet we do everything we can to prevent this from happening in schools and universities? Think about it – from Kindergarten to high school, we tell students to shut up and stop thinking and to study for exams, and we only slightly lighten the pressure in universities and yet, we want independent, mature and employable, thinking graduates?
The “Hole in the wall” and “Candle Experiment” have shown us very clearly what learners need and want. These experiments have also told us what we need to transform to and how to enable the transformation, and we still choose to ignore the science. If governments cannot handle the truth, though I am convinced that they do accept it, then it is up to stakeholders to help them “handle” it.
We have to have an ideal system that will create global citizens that are internationally acknowledged to be useful for the 21st century. The nature of 21st century education demands that we create ideal systems, settings and outcomes for our learner; for what are autonomy, purpose and mastery if not ideal qualities for every learner to grow into? We want our learners to be a Learning Community of Self Selecting, Decision Making individuals who are capable of living successfully and sustainably on this planet. We want learners who know who they are and who have confidence in who they are, simply because they have autonomously self-selected their chosen pathways, and who have, because of this, mastered their purpose on this planet