The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

the crucial task of education is to teach kids how to learn. To lead them to want to learn. To nurture curiosity, to encourage wonder, and to instill confidence so that later on they’ll have the tools for finding answers to the many questions we don’t yet know how to ask.

roots of our school system, the original aim of educators was not necessarily to produce the smartest students possible, but to turn out tractable and standardized citizens, workers who knew enough. To this end, attention was given not to what students could learn, but to the bare minimum of what they had to learn.

Conventional curricula don’t only tell students where to start; they tell students where to stop. A series of lessons ends; that subject is over. 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 limit what students believe they can do by selling short what we expect them to do.

the Prussian model is largely based on dividing human knowledge into artificially constrained chunks. Massive and flowing areas of human thought are diced up into stand-alone “subjects.” The school day is rigorously divided into “periods,” such that when the bell rings, discussion and exploration are lopped off. The strict grouping of students by age provides yet another axis along which education could be sliced up, compartmentalized, and therefore controlled.

nothing natural about segregating kids by age. That isn’t how families work; it isn’t what the world looks like; and it runs counter to the way that kids have learned and socialized for most of human history. Even the Mickey Mouse Club included kids of different ages, and as anyone who’s ever spent time around children can tell you, both younger and older kids benefit when different ages mix. The older ones take responsibility for the younger ones. (I see this even between my three-year-old and my one-year-old—and, trust me, it’s a remarkable thing to behold.) The younger ones look up to and emulate the older ones. Everyone seems to act more mature. Both younger and older rise to the occasion.

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.

Of all the outmoded ideas and customs that have made contemporary education inefficient and inappropriate to our needs, summer vacation is among the most egregious.

In point of fact, however, the most serious downside of summer vacation isn’t just that kids stop learning; it’s that they almost immediately start unlearning.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. —MARK TWAIN

Whether or not creativity, still less genius, can be taught, it can certainly be squelched. And our current factory model of education seems perversely designed to do exactly that.

That kind of creative work simply can’t be put on a deadline; genius doesn’t punch a time clock! Can you imagine if someone told Einstein, Okay, wrap up this relativity thing, we’re moving on to European history? Or said to Michelangelo, Time’s up for the ceiling, now go paint the walls. Yet versions of this snuffing out of creativity and boundary-stretching thought happen all the time in conventional schools.

By mixing ages and encouraging peer-to-peer tutoring, this schoolhouse would give adolescents the chance to begin to take on adult responsibilities.