I'm grateful to Carlotta for this link to a story about Sugata Mitra's famous computer in a hole in a wall experiment. He and his colleagues set up a PC with a mouse and stuck it in a hole in a wall in a slum in Delhi so that passers-by could have a go. Then they sat back to watch what happened.

The story is quite well-known, but for those who haven't heard it, what happened was that the slum children taught themselves to use the PC, and then set about teaching each other. Adults seemed to approve of their kids educating themselves in this way, but they didn't actually get involved in trying to teach the children, not did they try to learn themselves.

The story is a wonderful tribute to the innate ability of children to learn and discover things on their own, and it raises all sorts of interesting questions about why we try to educate children the way we do, or in fact, if we are actually educating them at all. Do children really need so much formal learning as they get now?

I wonder if, back in the days before state education, those who fell outside the system of private schools and tutors and dame schools and ragged schools that were the backbone of the education system in those days, ended up passing their discoveries between each other like the slum children of Delhi today. One can imagine a battered copy of Dickens being passed round the urchins, with the little ones desperate to learn their ABCs so they could share in the excitement.

There's a research project for somebody in there somewhere.