The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

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.

If attention lasted ten or fifteen minutes, why did it remain a given that class periods were an hour?

Teachers become more important once students have the initial exposure to a concept online (either through videos or exercises). Teachers can then carve out face time with individual students who are struggling; they can move away from rote lecturing and into the higher tasks of mentoring, inspiring, and providing perspective.

Stressing passivity over activity is one such misstep. 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.

In our misplaced zeal for tidy categories and teaching modules that fit neatly into a given length of class time, we deny students the benefit—the physiological benefit—of recognizing connections.

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.

Let me be clear as to why I raise this point. I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t go to college. My contention, rather, is that universities and their career-seeking students have a deep-seated contradiction to resolve: On the one hand, our society now views a college education as a gateway to employment; on the other hand, academia has tended to maintain a bias against the vocational.

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.

This failure to relate classroom topics to their eventual application in the real world is one of the central shortcomings of our broken classroom model, and is a direct consequence of our habit of rushing through conceptual modules and pronouncing them finished when in fact only a very shallow level of functional understanding has been reached.

So there’s a kind of circular logic, an endless loop going on. Teach what will be tested; test what most likely had been taught. Topics and ideas and levels of understanding that go beyond the probable parameters of the test tend to be ignored; they aren’t worth the classroom time.

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.

Was the main idea to keep school boards and vice principals in their comfort zone, or was the main idea to help students grow as thinking people?

If high school persuaded me of the crucial importance of independent study and self-paced learning, it took college to convince me of the incredible inefficiency, irrelevance, and even inhumanity of the standard broadcast lecture.

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.

We’ve already talked about how forcing math down students’ throats according to an artificially imposed one-pace-fits-all curriculum causes them to dislike it. It is even worse in the humanities.

What was truly startling was the reception the lessons received from students whom people had given up on, and who were about to give up on themselves. It made me realize that if you give students the opportunity to learn deeply and to see the magic of the universe around them, almost everyone will be motivated.