The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

It is often cited that American high school students now rank twenty-third in the world in science and math proficiency. From a U.S.-centric perspective, that’s distressing; but these tests are a very narrow measure of what is happening in a country.

Why do students forget so much of what they have supposedly “learned” as soon as an exam has been taken? Why do grown-ups sense such a disconnect between what they studied in school and what they do in the real world?

Provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

By the middle of 2012, Khan Academy had grown well beyond me. We were helping to educate more than six million unique students per month—more than ten times the number of people who have gone to Harvard since its inception in 1636—and this number was growing by 400 percent per year.

Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is; into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.

When and where do people concentrate best? The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the individual. Some people are at their sharpest first thing in the morning. Some are more receptive late at night. One person requires a silent house to optimize his focus; another seems to think more clearly with music playing or against the white noise of a coffee shop. Given all these variations, why do we still insist that the heaviest lifting in teaching and learning should take place in the confines of a classroom and to the impersonal rhythm of bells and buzzers?

they all fell in love with the New Orleans area. I believe that they did this because Louisiana was as close to South Asia as the United States could get; it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government.

This forced me to acknowledge that sometimes the presence of a teacher—either in the room or at the other end of a telephone connection; either in a class of thirty or tutoring one-to-one—can be a source of student thought-paralysis. From the teacher’s perspective, what’s going on is a helping relationship; but from the student’s point of view, it’s difficult if not impossible to avoid an element of confrontation.

said, “Nadia, I know you’re smart. I’m not judging you. But we’re changing the rules here. You’re not allowed to guess, and you’re not allowed to give me wishy-washy answers. There are only two things I want to hear. Either give me a definite, confident answer—yell it out!—or say, ‘Sal, I don’t understand. Please go over it again.’ You don’t have to get it the first time. I won’t think less of you for asking questions or wanting something repeated. Okay?”

Now, I definitely don’t agree with the knee-jerk opinion that hedge funds are evil; the majority of the people in the field are actually highly intellectual, good people. Still, the focus of a workday in investing is not exactly social service. Was that really how I wanted to spend my life? Was that really the best use of my limited time on Earth?

Let me make it clear that I did not discover this fact. I stumbled upon it by a mix of intuition and serendipity. But the truth is that well-credentialed educational theorists had long before determined that ten to eighteen minutes was about the limit of students’ attention spans.

period. It should be noted that this report centered on college students, and of course it was done before the age of texting and tweeting; presumably, the attention spans of younger people today have become even shorter, or certainly more challenged by distractions.

Human beings are also hardwired to focus on faces. We are constantly scanning the facial expressions of those around us to get information about the emotional state of the room and our place in it. We seem to be hardwired to meet each other’s gazes, to read lips even as we are listening. Anyone who has ever raised a baby has noticed its particular attention while looking at its mother; indeed, its parents’ faces are probably the very first things a newborn manages to focus on.

So if faces are so important to human beings, why exclude them from videos? Because they are a powerful distraction from the concepts being discussed. What, after all, is more distracting than a pair of blinking human eyes, a nose that twitches, and a mouth that moves with every word?

book. In a traditional academic model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the comprehension of the concept is variable. Washburne was advocating the opposite. What should be fixed is a high level of comprehension and what should be variable is the amount of time students have to understand a concept.

This is why it’s easier to learn something a second time; at least some of the necessary neural pathways are already there. It’s also a good incentive to bear down and concentrate the first time around, to etch the connections as durably as possible.

Another, equally important, is the failure of standard education to maximize the brain’s capacity for associative learning—the achieving of deeper comprehension and more durable memory by relating something newly learned to something already known.

A certain teaching method implies certain goals and certain tests. The tests, in turn, have a serious impact on hiring practices and career advancement. Human nature being what it is, those who prosper under a given system tend to become supporters of that system. Thus the powerful tend to have a bias toward the status quo; our educational customs tend to perpetuate themselves, and because they interconnect with so many other aspects of our culture, they are extraordinarily difficult to change.

As it was succinctly put in a recent article by an educator named Erin Murphy in the Wharton School’s online journal, the Beacon, the earliest forms of teaching and learning were essentially a case of “monkey see, monkey do.” In preliterate hunter-gatherer societies, parents taught their children the basic survival skills by practicing them themselves and, whenever possible, inserting an element of play into the process. This form of teaching was simply an extension of the way other animals also taught their young. Lion cubs, for example, learn to hunt by mimicking the stalking postures and strategies of their parents, and turning the exercise into a game. In the case of both lions and early humans, the stakes in education were of the highest order. The offspring who learned their lessons well went on to prosper and reproduce. In the unforgiving environment of the savanna, the kids who didn’t pay attention or never quite caught on were not around very long. To flunk was to perish.

those who believe that education should, above all, be practical, aimed at giving students the skills and information they need to make a living—that has existed for thousands of years, and exists still. On the other side are those who feel that seeking knowledge is an ennobling process worth pursuing for its own sake.

But let’s get back to some history. In terms of making knowledge available to the many, the most important technology since spoken language has been written text. It has allowed for knowledge to exist and be collected outside a human mind. This allowed for information to persist unchanged over generations and for large amounts of information to be standardized and distributed (without the distributor having to memorize it).

And to make it clear how privileged a thing books were in their early days, think about how they had to be produced. They would be hand-copied by very specialized people with good penmanship. Consider how much it would cost to have one of the most educated people in your town spend a few years copying, say, the Bible, and you’ll have a good sense of how expensive early books were—something on the order of a decent house in today’s terms. So you can imagine that few people had access to touch them, much less the ability to read them.

Prussia—with its stiff whiskers, stiff hats, and stiff way of marching in lockstep—is where our basic classroom model was invented. Compulsory, tax-supported public education was seen as a political at least as much as a pedagogical tool, and no apology was made for this.

The idea was not to produce independent thinkers, but to churn out loyal and tractable citizens who would learn the value of submitting to the authority of parents, teachers, church, and, ultimately, king. The Prussian philosopher and political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key figure in the development of the system, was perfectly explicit about its aims. “If you want to influence a person,” he wrote, “you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”

However, whether it was intentional or not, the system tended to stifle deeper inquiry and independent thought.

“wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.… School trains children to be employees and consumers.”4

Chances are that the topics themselves have not been covered thoroughly enough, because our schools measure out their efforts in increments of time rather than in target levels of mastery.

This outcome is actually what the Prussian architects of our standard classroom model explicitly intended. Tests determined who would go to school beyond eighth grade and who would not. This, in turn, would dictate who was eligible for the more prestigious and remunerative professions, and who would be consigned to a lifetime of menial labor and low social status.

some took the interesting step of forbidding homework on the evening before major standardized exams, perhaps sending the message that it was okay for kids to be stressed and exhausted except when taking tests that might reflect on the performance of the school itself.

The amount of homework assigned—if considered without reference to a raft of many other complicating factors, such as cultural differences, reporting variations, and, not least, widely varying dynamics within families—is a really lousy indicator of future performance, either individual or national.

Traditional homework is a driver of inequality, and in this regard it runs directly counter both to the stated aims of public education and to our sense of fairness. Insofar as parents can help with homework, moms and dads who are themselves well educated obviously have a huge advantage. Even when the homework help is indirect, households with books and families with a tradition of educational success have an unfair edge. Wealthier kids are less likely to be burdened with after-school jobs or chores that single parents—or exhausted parents—can’t perform. In short, homework contributes to an unlevel playing field in which, educationally speaking, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The promise of technology is to liberate teachers from those largely mechanical chores so that they have more time for human interactions. In many standard classrooms, teachers are so overburdened with mundane tasks that they are lucky to carve out 10 or 20 percent of class time to actually be with students—face-to-face, one-on-one, talking and listening. Imagine what could happen if that figure went to 90 or 100 percent of class time. The student-to-time-with-the teacher ratio would improve by a factor of five or ten. And this is the metric we should care about.

the videos, the self-paced exercises, the knowledge map, the feedback dashboard.

Ann’s text message was the beginning of a surreal series of events. Two months later, Aragon and I were running our little one-week summer camp for the second year. One afternoon, while I had twenty kids working on one of our crazy projects, I got a text message from Ann. Actually I got several from her in a row. They read something like: At Aspen… hundreds of people in audience Bill Gates onstage, talking about you Good day wife let you quit job

Two days later, an article about the Khan Academy came out in Fortune magazine. It was titled “Bill Gates’ Favorite Teacher.” I had talked to the author, David Kaplan, a few weeks prior and knew that he had also talked to Gates, but still, that headline was unreal. The article made my mother cry—I think it was the first time she wasn’t completely annoyed that I hadn’t gone to medical school.

But I, and eventually the rest of the team, always dreamt of being more than just a powerful online resource. We felt that we were at a point in history where education could be rethought altogether.

Our underserved, underperforming, and purportedly “slow” kids were now operating at the same—or higher—level as their more affluent peers.

As we settled into the MIT routine, Shantanu and I began independently to arrive at the same subversive but increasingly obvious conclusion: The giant lecture classes were a monumental waste of time.

Kids of different ages should mix. Without the tyranny of the broadcast lecture and the one-size-fits-all curriculum, there is no reason this can’t be done. With self-paced learning established as the basic model, there’s no reason to lump kids by age, still less to “track” them based on perceived potential.

If students are working in multiage groups, all at their own pace, there is no longer an artificial stopping point when you transition to the “next” grade. If your family wants to travel to Europe or you have people coming over for the holidays or you want to start a business, it’s not a big deal. Just take the time off. You can’t “miss” class, because you’re working at your own pace. Even better, you can still do a lot of learning while on the road now that you have access to self-paced videos and exercises. The same flexibility would apply to teachers. Because of the multiteacher environment, teachers could stagger vacations during the year. No one would be asked to give up a restorative break or time for travel, but these would happen without the need of shutting down the entire system.

First, I would eliminate letter grades altogether. In a system based on mastery learning,

Admittedly, this is a rather grandiose ambition. It probably springs at least in part from the fact that I myself am the child of immigrants and I have seen with my own eyes places like Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where the inadequacy and unfair distribution of educational opportunity is a scandal and a tragedy (and pre-Katrina New Orleans wasn’t much better).

As a parent myself, I completely understand the human tendency to regard one’s own kids as the most precious in the universe. To every mother and every father, of course they are; biology takes care of that. But there is a somewhat dangerous corollary to this natural parental love. Sometimes it seems that, both as individuals and as societies, we think it’s okay to be selfish as long as it’s on behalf of the kids. Clearly, there’s a hypocrisy here; we’re still serving the interests of our own DNA and our own narrow clan. We give ourselves a free pass on something that is emotionally right but morally wrong. As long as our kids are getting educated, we won’t worry about the kids a block, or a nation, or a continent away. But are we really doing our kids a favor by taking this isolationist, me-first position?

Say we aim to give kids in poor rural villages around the world virtually the same experience as kids in Silicon Valley have. This is preposterous, right? Well, I believe it can be done. Consider: Inexpensive tablet computers (think of smaller, cheaper iPads) are coming onto the market in India for under $100. If it can be expected to run for around five years, the annual cost of owning this device is $20.

Think about the implications. Most students who go to college are not going to nationally known private colleges like Princeton or Rice or Duke. They are also not going to well-known state universities like Berkeley, UT Austin, or the University of Michigan.

One of my all-time favorite books is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—I know, a bit girly, but great is great. I hated the book when I was forced to read it and write a book report at fourteen. I only realized that I loved it—and a lot of literature—when I reread it for fun on a whim when I was twenty-three. The same is true for Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, and Brave New World. Not only was I more mature and had more perspective on life, but I had the time and motivation to appreciate it.

It also should be noted that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a new university. Existing campuses could move in this direction by deemphasizing or eliminating lecture-based courses, having their students more engaged in research and co-ops in the broader world, and having more faculty with broad backgrounds who show a deep desire to mentor students.