Keswick Film Club - Reviews - Radical

How would you take a class of kids with little previous education and no chance of any real jobs and make them into the brightest brains in the country? Well, the answer appears to be you let them do it themselves. This film, 'Radical' is based on an article in 'Wired' about the real-life work of a teacher in Mexico - Sergio Juarez Correa – who had seen a YouTube video about a new method of teaching; Sugata Mitra basically gave some children in India access to a computer and just left them to it. They went on to teach themselves all sorts of things "from DNA replication to English"

Sergio had no idea how to do this but decided to give it a try with his class. He led them to think for themselves and work out various new concepts ("he went to his whiteboard and wrote '1 = 1.00.' Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote '½ = ?' and '¼ = ?'". He then walked out and left them to it and they worked out 0.50 and 0.25)

At the end of the year his class were made to take the national exams; the previous year 45% had failed maths, 31% failed Spanish. This year, only 7% failed maths, 3.5% failed Spanish. AND from none at all, 63% of them were graded Excellent in Maths, one girl, Paloma, got the highest mark in the country, ten others were not far behind.

Our film simply and beautifully fictionalised this, leaving almost all of us in the audience inspired; could it really be true...? If you want to believe it, I suggest you read the article from 'Wired' – "A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses", by Joshua Davis. Why are all governments not doing this?!