The Education Problem: Raj Reddy (Part 2)

Essential to Raj’s vision is the creation of a knowledge base, which requires a substantial amount of time and funding to develop. Here we learn one manner in which this can be accomplished.

SM: Before you move on let me ask you, purely from a systems building and systems scalability point of view, if you’re talking about a learning by doing exercise, are you then talking about some sort of a knowledge base that has different problems and the different questions to facilitate the students’ learning? Is that the kind of vision you are thinking about? RR: Exactly, the knowledge base in Simon’s case was a piece of paper. I have a stack of 3,000 papers and they are published in Chinese. I am trying to get my colleagues in China to translate them, and not just translate them but put them online so it becomes a sort of knowledge base, at least an information base.

The issue of course is that what they have is not enough, there are a lot of innovations to be done on top, and I am prepared to do that. The bottom line is what you said, learning by doing is a lot more expensive up front because you have to create this knowledge base. But once you create it, it is infinitely scalable because you can use it all over.

SM: This is the same conclusion that I had arrived at. Initial knowledge base creation is a very expensive process, but if that knowledge base exists, then the teachers can be taught what questions they should be asking. There is a teachers’ training element to this, right? RR: Yes. Basically it is very expensive if you try to do it in the USA, less so in India. Unfortunately, in India you have 20 million kids born each year, and at any given point in time there are 200,000 in tutorial colleges which is 1% of the population. Of this top 1%, only 2000 get into IIT.

There are a lot of bright kids out there who you can press to this task; first they are going to learn, then they are going to teach, and then they are going to create a knowledge base.

SM: Are you doing something like that in India? Are you doing the knowledge base piece? RR: Yes, I am doing exactly that right now. There is a website called www.gurukulam.in.

[To Be Continued]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 2 in the series : The Education Problem: Raj Reddy
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