Everybody knows that the Internet will transform education, but nobody yet knows how. Most of the models sound like dull attempts to reproduce, at a distance, the medieval habit of schooling—one teacher telling a bunch of children what to think. Now, though, I think I have glimpsed a better idea: the self-organized learning environment (SOLE).

The credit for this approach belongs to Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist who, a decade ago, began to install public "hole in the wall" computers in the streets...