The methodology arose from an experiment done by Sugata Mitra while at NIIT in 1999, often called The Hole in the Wall,[1][2] which has since gone on to become a significant project with the formation of Hole in the Wall Education Limited (HiWEL), a cooperative effort between NIIT and the International Finance Corporation, employed in some 300 'learning stations', covering some 300,000 children in India and several African countries.
On 26 January 1999, Mitra's team carved a "hole in the wall" that separated the NIIT premises from the adjoining slum in Kalkaji, New Delhi.
Given free and public access to computers and the Internet, a group of children can The first adopter of the idea was the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi.
At this point in time, International Finance Corporation joined hands with NIIT to set up Hole-in-the-Wall Education Ltd (HiWEL).
In India Suhotra Banerjee (Head-Government Relations) has increased the reach of HiWEL learning stations in Nagaland, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh... and is slowly expanding their numbers.
Established in 2001, HiWEL was set up to research and propagate the idea of Hole-in-the-Wall, a path-breaking learning methodology created by Mitra, Chief Scientist of NIIT.
[2] The project has received extensive coverage from sources as diverse as UNESCO,[9] Business Week,[10] CNN, Reuters,[7] and The Christian Science Monitor,[11] besides being featured at the annual TED conference in 2007.
They adduce that in their schools no one child has ever been forced, pushed, urged, cajoled, or bribed into learning how to read or write, and they have had no dyslexia.
None of their graduates are real or functional illiterates, and no one who meets their older students could ever guess the age at which they first learned to read or write.
Describing current instructional methods as homogenization and lockstep standardization, alternative approaches are proposed, such as the Sudbury model schools, an alternative approach in which children, by enjoying personal freedom thus encouraged to exercise personal responsibility for their actions, learn at their own pace rather than following a chronologically-based curriculum.
[20][21] As Sudbury schools, proponents of unschooling have also claimed that children raised in this method do not suffer from learning disabilities, thus not requiring the prevention of academic failure through intervention.