Last Updated on November 10, 2026 by Karl Thompson
In 1999 Sugata Mitra put a computer connected to the internet in a hole in the wall in a slum in Kalkaji, Delhi, and just left it there, to see what would happen.
The computer attracted a number of illiterate, slum children, who, according to Mitra, by the end of the first day had taught themselves to surf the internet, despite not knowing what a computer or the internet were, or being able to read.
Taking the experiment further
Over the following years Mitra extended his hole in the wall experiment to see whether children could learn more specific, academic knowledge on their own.
In one study, in the Tamil-speaking village of Kalikuppam in southern India, 10–14 year olds were given a hole-in-the-wall computer loaded with material on molecular biology, in English, and left to teach themselves (Mitra and Dangwal, 2010). Children who had only the computer achieved test scores comparable with those at the local state school. When an adult ‘mediator’ was added, who didn’t know the subject, their scores rose to the level of their peers at a private school in the city.
Mitra then took his methods to schools in England, including in Gateshead, where unsupervised groups of 8–12 year olds worked on questions using the internet. Mitra reports that, without the language barrier, children as young as nine were able to teach themselves about topics as difficult as quantum entanglement.
For Mitra, the absence of a teacher was acting as a pedagogical tool.
Mitra’s theory of learning
Mitra’s basic theory of learning is that children simply need two things to learn effectively:
- Firstly, they need to be allowed to crowd around computers which are connected to the internet.
- Secondly, they need the absence of a teacher.
This is the absolute opposite of our current model of education, which Mitra argues was built to meet the needs of the British Empire, when people had to do the work of machines, and the system needed identical people who needed to be taught to not ask questions, and under no circumstances be creative.
We still have this model today – which is also a ‘just in case’ model of education – we teach people to be able to do things (e.g. solve quadratic equations) just in case they need to be able to do so.
According to Mitra, this model is completely out of date and out of touch with (post?) modern times – now that all knowledge is available online, the idea of individual knowledge is simply redundant: we don’t need to know until we need to know – and we need to move to a ‘just in time’ model of education, in which kids are allowed to learn quickly from the internet what they need when they need it.
Interestingly Mitra says he finds the idea of the redundancy of individual knowledge distasteful, but he has to report what the data from his Hole in the Wall Experiment reveals.
Mitra isn’t saying that we don’t need teachers, just that we don’t need the type of teacher who gives uni-directional instructions, rather you need a teacher to be a friend, for moral support and a role model, to guide you through learning.
What children need is a self-organised learning environment (Mitra calls these SOLEs) – and it does help if you have an adult who isn’t necessarily knowledgeable but is admiring who spurs children on (like his own Grandmother did).
In 2013 Mitra won the $1 million TED Prize to build a ‘School in the Cloud’, a learning lab in India where children learn through the internet with online mentors. At the time he was Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University.
Do we still need schools?
All of this raises the question of whether we actually need schools? The general consensus of the radio discussion this post is based on seemed to be that we do, but primarily because they are social environments, and children benefit from the social aspect of schooling, and that we don’t necessarily need traditional teachers.
Mitra also suggests that we need to re-think about what socialising actually is, and how technology might be changing this – when you’re scrolling through social media, for example, is that socialising, or is it something completely different?
Evaluating the Hole in the Wall experiment
Not all hole-in-the-wall kiosks worked. Payal Arora (2010) studied two hole-in-the-wall kiosks in the Himalayan towns of Almora and Hawalbagh. One was closed within months after vandalism; the other went dormant after a few years when its unpaid caretakers stopped being supported and bills went unpaid. Teachers and students told her the computers were mostly used for games, and she found little evidence of meaningful learning. Girls used the kiosks less than boys, which suggests that ‘free’ access can reproduce existing inequalities rather than remove them.
Learning may depend on adults after all. Mitra’s own Kalikuppam results improved most when an adult mediator was added. That suggests the role of adults, even non-expert ones, matters more than the slogan ‘the absence of a teacher’ implies.
Much of the evidence comes from Mitra himself. Many of the most striking claims, such as the children who taught themselves to use the internet in a day, come from Mitra’s own talks and reports, rather than independent evaluations.
But it challenges assumptions about how children learn. The experiments suggest that children, including those with little formal education, can learn a great deal through curiosity and collaboration. This supports postmodern and child-centred critiques of traditional, teacher-led schooling.
Research methods: a field experiment
The Hole in the Wall experiment is a useful example of a field experiment: it took place in a natural setting, with children who chose to use the computer, rather than in a laboratory.
- Strength: high ecological validity. The children behaved as they normally would in their own neighbourhood, so their behaviour wasn’t distorted by an artificial setting.
- Limitation: little control over variables. In the original 1999 trial Mitra couldn’t control who used the computer, how often, or whether older children or adults helped. That makes it hard to say what caused the learning.
- Later studies added comparison groups. The Kalikuppam study compared the children’s test scores with pupils at a local state school and a private school, which makes its findings easier to interpret than the original trial’s.
- Self-selection. The children who used the kiosks chose to, so they may have been more curious or confident than others. As Arora found, some groups (such as girls) were less likely to take part.
Sociology of Education Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle, written by Karl Thompson, who taught A-level sociology for eighteen years and spent twelve as an AQA examiner, marking all three papers on the current specification.
Signposting and Related Posts
- Changing Education Paradigms (Ken Robinson)
- Postmodernism and education
- The globalisation of education
- Field experiments in sociology
This material is relevant to the sociology of education and to research methods.
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Sources
- Arora, P. (2010) ‘Hope-in-the-Wall? A digital promise for free learning’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(5), 689–702.
- BBC Radio 4, Start the Week: Technology in Education.
- Mitra, S. and Dangwal, R. (2010) ‘Limits to self-organising systems of learning – the Kalikuppam experiment’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(5), 671–688.
- Newcastle University press release (26 February 2013) on Mitra’s TED Prize.