The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

The dominant method in our traditional classrooms is still the broadcast lecture; one of the most cited metrics in our public debates is class size. But there’s a disconnect between those things. If a teacher’s main job is lecturing, what does it really matter how many students are in the room? Whatever the class size, how customized can instruction be when kids sit passively, taking notes, and the great majority of the teacher’s time and energy is devoted to lesson plans, grading papers, and paperwork?

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...

To offer a rough analogy, it was as if they’d been taught, in two different lessons, how to use a hammer and how to use a screwdriver. Told to hammer, they could hammer. Told to put in a screw, they could use a screwdriver. But told to build a shelf, they’d be paralyzed even though it was just a combination of concepts that they should have learned.

Fortunately, this kind of information management is exactly what computers are good at. So the next step in the refinement of the software was to devise a hierarchy or web of concepts—the “knowledge map” we’ve already seen—so that the system itself could advise students what to work on next. Once they’d mastered the addition and subtraction of fractions, for example, they could move on to simple linear equations. Having the software hand out the “assignments” left me free to do the essentially human parts of the job—the actual mentoring and tutoring.

This was in vivid and unexpected contrast to the group that had started at the fifth-grade level. Since they’d begun with such a big head start, I assumed that by the end of the six-week program they would be working on far more advanced concepts than the other group. In fact just the opposite happened. As in the classic story of the tortoise and the hare, the 1 + 1 group plodded and plodded and eventually passed them right by. Some of the students in the “head start” group, on the other hand, hit a wall and just couldn’t seem to progress. There were sixth-and seventh-grade concepts that they simply couldn’t seem to master, presumably because of gaps in earlier concepts. In comparing the performance of the two groups, the conclusion seemed abundantly clear: 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.

As it turned out, the feedback spreadsheet was much more than a tidy graphic feature; it fundamentally altered the dynamic of the classroom. Once again, the use of technology made the classroom more human by facilitating one-on-one interactions; by letting the teacher know who needed her attention most. Even better, a student who had already mastered a particular concept could be paired with one who was struggling. Or two students, stuck in the same place, could work together to get past their common hurdle. In all of these instances, the clear emphasis would be on quality, helping interactions.

I did a database query for students who, at the start of the program, seriously lagged their peers—and would therefore have probably been tracked “slow” by placement exams—but who then turned out to be among the top performers.

what this admittedly tiny sample suggested was that fully 10 percent of the kids might have been tracked as slow, and treated accordingly, when they were fully capable of doing very well in math.

Because all of the student and teacher tools we were using with our pilots were available for anyone to use, it became clear from our server data that there were also more than ten thousand teacher-led classrooms or cohorts, serving 350,000 students around the world, that were using us independently of any formal pilot program.

We believe that our use of Khan Academy is resulting in a fundamental change in student character—with responsibility replacing apathy and effort replacing laziness. We believe that this character change is the primary reason behind the stunning results we are beginning to experience—at both the class level and in individual students.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age. —MARGARET MEAD

This experience and the feedback I received from it convinced me that Khan Academy had a duty to do much more than just present standard academic topics for traditional school-age students. There was a deep need to help educate people of all ages regarding the ever-changing dynamics of the world around them. With the world becoming more and more complex, true democracy—not to mention peace of mind—was at risk if average folks couldn’t understand what was happening and why.

As we saw earlier in our brief discussion of neuroscience and memory, handling and storing information in the brain is a physical process. It takes energy; it burns calories; it leads to the synthesis of new proteins and the alteration of existing ones. In all these regards, brainwork is closely analogous to physical exercise, and likewise subject to the rule of use-it-or-lose-it. Moreover, we don’t simply choose to exercise our brains or not; we can even choose which parts of our brains to work on.

Androgogy, on the other hand, puts the emphasis and the responsibility on the learner himself. Adults don’t have to learn; they choose to learn. This active choosing and the motivation behind it serve to focus our attention and thereby make learning easier. 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.”4

Since we can’t predict exactly what today’s young people will need to know in ten or twenty years, what we teach them is less important than how they learn to teach themselves.

Without doubt, these guys were bright, but not freakishly so; their argument, in fact, was that any of us—not just at MIT but at every high school and university—should be able to handle twice as many courses if we avoided the seat time and simply pursued whatever actually helped us learn. There was no hocus-pocus here, no miracle shortcuts to academic success. It took discipline and work, quite a lot of each. But the idea was to work effectively, naturally, and independently.

Why aren’t students encouraged to go farther and deeper—to learn twice as much? Probably for the same reason we consider 70 percent a passing grade. Our standards are too low. We’re so squeamish and embarrassed about the very notion of “failure” that we end up diluting and devaluing the idea of success.

We can go much farther, and get there far more efficiently, with self-paced study, mentoring, and hands-on experiences. We can reach more ambitious goals if we are given the latitude to set those goals for ourselves.

For the above reasons, I believe that the school of the future should be built around an updated version of the one-room schoolhouse. 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. The older or more advanced students become allies of the teacher by mentoring and tutoring the kids who are behind. Younger students benefit by having a range of role models, big brothers and big sisters. Older kids sharpen and refine their understanding of concepts in the act of explaining them to younger kids. No one is just a student; everyone is a teacher as well, worthy of the respect that goes with that.

I’m not suggesting either a net loss or a net gain of teaching positions. But rather than three or four separate classes of twenty-five kids and one lonesome teacher, I would suggest a class of seventy-five to a hundred students with three or four teachers. To me there are several clear advantages to this, all of which stem from the enhancement of flexibility in a system such as this.

In emotional as well as pedagogic ways, a multiteacher classroom makes sense. Given the mysteries of human personality, certain kids and certain teachers will always discover affinities that become the basis for important bonds; having several teachers in a classroom allows more opportunities for this magic to occur. Finally, I believe a multiple-teacher system would go a long way toward solving the very serious problem of teacher burnout. Giving teachers more professional companionship and real-time peer support would make their work less stressful. As in almost every other field, teachers would now be able to observe and mentor each other. Younger teachers would learn from more experienced ones. Older teachers would absorb energy and fresh ideas from newer ones. Everyone would benefit from being less isolated.

At a given moment, perhaps one-fifth of the students would be doing computer-based lessons and exercises aimed at a deep and durable grasp of core concepts. Let me pause a moment to stress this: one-fifth of the students. This is another way of saying that only one-fifth of the school day, or one to two hours, would be spent on the Khan Academy lessons (or some future version thereof) and any peer tutoring that it might catalyze. Given the greatly increased efficiency of self-paced, mastery-based learning, one or two hours is enough, and this should ease the concerns of any technophobes out there who fear that technology-based education means that kids would sit numbly in front of computer screens all day.

My preferred scenario would be to trade it for a perpetual school experience where vacations can be taken whenever there is a need for one—not too different from what happens in companies. 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.

computer-based, self-paced mastery learning can solve many of the problems that summer vacation creates. First of all, Internet-based lessons such as those offered by Khan Academy are always available. The Internet doesn’t close for the summer! Motivated kids can continue advancing and reviewing. Their minds stay active, their neurons keep firing. This leaves the question of teacher help and feedback. As we’ve seen in the discussion of the Los Altos pilot program, the Academy has, with the help of experienced classroom teachers, developed a sophisticated feedback dashboard to give teachers real-time information regarding students’ progress and difficulties. The dashboard doesn’t need a school building in order to be accessed; there is no reason why teachers couldn’t continue to monitor student work and serve as online tutors during the summer.

Well-designed tests can give a pretty solid idea of what a student has learned, but only a very approximate picture of what she can learn. To put it in a slightly different way, tests tend to measure quantities of information (and sometimes knowledge) rather than quality of minds—not to mention character. Besides, for all their attempts to appear precise and comprehensive, test scores seldom identify truly notable ability.

First, I would eliminate letter grades altogether. In a system based on mastery learning, there is no need and no place for them. Students advance only when they demonstrate clear proficiency with a concept, as measured either by the ten-in-a-row heuristic or some future refinement of it. Since no one is pushed ahead (or left behind) until proficiency is reached, the only possible grade would be an A. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, all the kids would be way above average, so grades would be pointless.

In pursuit of the elusive ideal of comparing apples to apples, I would keep some version of standardized testing, though with several significant changes. I would alter the content of the tests from year to year far more than is currently done, include richer tasks, and attempt to incorporate an open-ended design component; this would limit the appeal of test-prep factories and in turn lessen the unfair advantage held by kids from wealthy families. The emphasis of the exam would also not be a one-time snapshot, but something that could and should be retaken after refining one’s skills (more affluent students already treat the SAT this way). And in recognition of the hard truth that standardized tests will never be perfect, I would put far less emphasis on them than is currently the case. Instead, I would propose, as the centerpieces of student appraisal, two things: a running, multiyear narrative not only of what a student has learned but how she learned it; and a portfolio of a student’s creative work.

the far more interesting element of the feedback is qualitative. This is where tremendous progress remains to be made—a very exciting prospect for the very near future. Aside from counting concepts and measuring time, what can we infer from a student’s efforts at Khan Academy or some other version of computer-based education? What can we learn about his or her work ethic, persistence, resilience—elements of character that are at least as important as sheer intelligence as predictors of success?

This brings me to the idea of the “creative portfolio” as a central part of a student’s “transcript.” Everyone is beginning to recognize that curiosity and creativity are more important attributes than a mere facility for a particular subject; yet except for narrowly defined art schools, few institutions even consider an applicant’s creative output. This is doubly wrong. First, it implies that only “art” is creative—a view that is provincial and limiting. Science, engineering, and entrepreneurship are equally creative. Second, if we fail to take a serious look at what students have created on their own, above and beyond lessons and tests, we miss an opportunity to appreciate what is truly special about them. More than any data, grades, or assessment, someone’s actual creative product is the best testament of his or her ability to create from scratch, to make a solution out of an open-ended problem.

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? I don’t think so. I think we’re condemning them to live in a world of broadening inequality and increasing instability. The better way to help our kids is to help all kids.

Consider an analogy with cell phones. Cell phones have changed life everywhere, but they have positively revolutionized it in the developing world. Why? Because the developing world had so few landlines. For most people there, cell phones aren’t just an add-on, they are it. As with telephones, so with education—the more egregiously that people were underserved before, the more revolutionary an improvement they will experience.

These are realities that educators of any stripe must grapple with. But for various reasons I am convinced that software-based, self-paced learning has the best chance of thriving in these sorts of circumstances.

Why? Let’s start with cost. If school districts in poor countries can’t even afford secondhand textbooks, pencils, and blackboard erasers, how can they possibly afford up-to-the-minute video lessons? The answer is that the lessons, in their most basic form, could be delivered virtually for free.

What if we were to separate (or decouple) the teaching and credentialing roles of universities? What would happen if regardless of where (or whether) you went to college, you could take rigorous, internationally recognized assessments that measured your understanding and proficiency in various fields—anything from quantum physics to European history to software engineering. Some could be assessments designed in conjunction with employers looking for people with particular skills. Because these assessments could be even more thorough than what happens during exam time at many universities, they might be expensive, maybe $300 a pop. You could also take these exams at any age.

With our hypothetical assessments—microcredentials if you will—anyone could prove that they know just as much in a specific domain as someone with an exclusive diploma. Even more, they wouldn’t have had to go into debt and attend university to prove it. They could prepare through textbooks, the Khan Academy, or tutorials from a family member. Because even name-brand diplomas give employers limited information, it would be a way for even elite college graduates to differentiate themselves from their peers, to show that they actually have retained deep, useful skills. In short, it would make the credential that most students and parents need cheaper (since it is an assessment that is not predicated on seat time in lecture halls) and more powerful—it would actually tell employers who is best ready to contribute at their organizations based on metrics that they find important.

top employers have begun to treat summer internships as something of a farm league. They observe students actually working and make offers to those who perform the best. Employers know that working with a student is an infinitely better assessment than any degree or transcript.