◼ There is no greater threat to our Republic than the merging of the helicopter parent with the modern day legislator. - Human Events
The miracle of modern childhood is that children flourish despite parents’ best efforts; the miracle of a market economy is it thrives despite government’s paternalism. The story of an Indian educational entrepreneur illustrates that well.
When Sugata Mitra received his PhD in physics, he anticipated a lengthy teaching career. He quickly realized the only people who understood computer programming went into physics. Then one day in 1999, looking out his Delhi office window, he noticed groups of ragtag children wandering the streets.
He had an idea. He built a simple kiosk that housed nothing but a computer. He did not know what to expect but his rules were simple: Only children could use it. There would be no adults and no instructional manual.
That “Hole in the Wall” experiment did more than launch a new career. It led to Minimally Invasive Education—a philosophy built around the notion that unsupervised poor Indian children, without the benefit of English but armed with a computer and Internet connection, could develop basic computer literacy equal to the average office assistant in the West.
It also inspired Vikas Swarup to write the novel that later became the movie Slumdog Millionaire. KEEP READING
