The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

I believe that personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.

most of the very brightest people I know enjoy revisiting basic ideas and seeing even deeper layers, fully realizing that they might never fully “get” most things.

Nearly all the students needed some degree of remediation, and the time spent on finding and fixing the gaps turned out both to save time and deepen learning in the longer term.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD

The older brain has a tougher time assembling the most basic building blocks of learning. This makes it somewhat more challenging for adults to learn entirely new things and explains, for example, why it seems to be easier to learn a foreign language early in life. On the other hand, adults seem to be better at learning by association. With a bigger knowledge base to begin with, and long-established habits of logic and deduction, grown-ups are more likely to grasp new concepts by way of their connections to ideas already known.

As it was expressed by Malcolm Knowles in his seminal book The Adult Learner, “If we know why we are learning and if the reason fits our needs as we perceive them, we will learn quickly and deeply.”

as anyone who’s ever spent time around children can tell you, both younger and older kids benefit when different ages mix.

Take away this mix of ages and everybody loses something. Younger kids lose heroes and idols and mentors. Perhaps even more damagingly, older kids are deprived of a chance to be leaders, to exercise responsibility, and are thereby infantilized.

Of late there has been much hand-wringing about the state of mind of contemporary teenagers—a seemingly widespread malaise found everywhere from New York to Berlin to Bahrain, and whose symptoms run the gamut from mere slackerism all the way to suicide. I would suggest that at least a significant part of the problem is our failure to entrust adolescents with real responsibility. Yes, we stress them out with demands and competition… but only to do with themselves. We deny them the chance to mentor or help others, and we thereby conspire in their isolation and self-involvement. Biologically, kids start becoming grown-ups around the age of twelve. That’s when they can reproduce, and while I’m certainly not advocating teenage parenthood, I do believe that nature would not have made it possible unless adolescents were also wired to be ready to take responsibility for others. High school kids are burgeoning adults, but by narrowly restricting them to the companionship of their peers, responsible for no one but themselves, we treat them as children—and children they tend to remain.

By contrast, from the perspective of many students, teachers are not viewed as someone who is on their side. They are not viewed as someone preparing them for competition with an adversary. Unfortunately, they are often seen as the adversary themselves—someone who throws busywork and disjointed formulas at them in order to make sure they have no free time and humiliate them.

And it is unfair to expect traditional universities to cater to the whims of the economy or job market. They are designed to be places insulated from the “real world” so that intellectual truth and pure research can be pursued with as few practical constraints as possible. This is what allows them to be truly fertile soil for breakthrough ideas and fundamental discoveries.

seriously?