The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

As an example of this, consider the hypothesis that people have different “learning styles.” Around thirty years ago, it was proposed that some people are primarily “verbal learners” while others are mainly “visual learners.” On the face of it, this seemed a reasonable idea. Some people, after all, seem better with names than with faces, and vice versa. Confronted with a user’s manual for some new device, some people will read the text while others will go straight to the diagrams. Ergo, visual learning versus verbal learning. This seemingly commonsensical observation gained favor and thereby “created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.”1 Separate exercises and even textbooks were devised for each purported learning style. Shiny new teacher’s guides were printed up and put on sale to willing school districts. As many as seventy-one different learning styles had been suggested. There were only two problems with the “learning styles” theory. The first was that it really didn’t hold water. In 2009, a report published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest reviewed the major studies that had suggested that people have different learning styles. The great majority of studies didn’t meet the minimum standards to be scientifically valid. The few that did seem valid—that rigorously examined whether instructing people in their purported learning style really improved their results—seemed to contradict the thesis. Teaching ac...