The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

Even more troubling, many people seem somehow to overlook the basic fact of what the crisis is about. It’s not about graduation rates and test scores. It’s about what those things mean to the outcome of human lives. It’s about potential realized or squandered, dignity enhanced or denied.

I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught.

convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe.

What I didn’t want was the dreary process that sometimes went on in classrooms—rote memorization and plug-in formulas aimed at nothing more lasting or meaningful than a good grade on the next exam. Rather, I hoped to help students see the connections, the progression, between one lesson and the next; to hone their intuitions so that mere information, absorbed one concept at a time, could develop into true mastery of a subject. In a word,

me. We were helping to educate more than six million unique students per month—more

growing by 400 percent per year.

140 million times

I had personally posted more than t...

stage of the learning process, to adopt an active stance toward their education. They shouldn’t just take things in; they should figure things out. This is an extremely valuable habit to inculcate,

Portability and self-pacing, then, are essential aids to active, self-motivated learning.

Parts of the system we now hold sacred—for example, the length of the class period or the number of years assigned to “elementary” or “high” school—are in fact rather arbitrary,

It’s what we’ve always done, just as we’ve always sent our kids to certain kinds of schools that operate in certain kinds of ways. It’s a cultural habit that we take for granted.

Plato’s and Aristotle’s pure approach to learning as a deep search for truth; this

Why should it prove so difficult to design a school that would teach both skill and wisdom, or even better, wisdom through skill? That’s the challenge and the opportunity we face today.

How can we most effectively deploy standardized learning tools without undermining the unique gifts of teachers?

The Prussian philosopher and political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key figure in the development of the system, was perfectly explicit about its aims. “If you want to influence a person,” he wrote, “you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”

political indoctrination.

Former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto

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Subjects could be learned by rote memorization, whereas mastering larger ideas called for free and unbridled thinking.

“class period” was put in place “so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.”

Is this true? Was there an explicit intent to "mute" curiosity? Check source.

By design, order trumped curiosity; regimentation took precedence over personal initiative.

Today’s world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses.

we do ourselves and our kids a disservice if we fail to look past those minimum requirements and recognize the places where the system has become creaky and archaic, and why old customs and standards no longer suffice.

John Taylor Gatto, “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why,” Harper’s, September 2003.