The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

I am a big believer that inspiring physical spaces and rich community really do elevate and develop one’s thinking. So we’ll put in dormitories, nicely manicured outdoor spaces, and as many areas that facilitate interaction and collaboration as possible.

The elements of instruction… should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.

Unfortunately, our educational establishment seems to have an abiding fear and hatred of failure, to regard it as a dirty word. In a world of letter grades, a D or an F is a stain; under a system of brittle benchmarks and politically motivated incentives, a “failure” carries a stigma and a penalty. So we lower our standards and water down our expectations in the illusory hope of bringing “success” within the reach of all. But this attitude is both hypocritical and condescending. Not only does it drain the meaning from the true ideal of excellence, but it completely fails to grasp the value of aiming high, even if the result is falling short. Our world needs bold thinking and innovative approaches. Those things are much more likely to be offshoots of big failures than of small, safe, and predictable successes.

Accordingly, the school I envision would be a place where mistakes are allowed, tangents are encouraged, and big thinking is celebrated as a process—whatever the outcome might turn out to be. This is no magic formula to make kids more creative; rather, it’s a way to give light and space and time to the creativity that already exists in each of us—and that, in some mysterious few who will go on to change the world, rises to the level of genius.