The One World Schoolhouse Quotes

“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.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“My basic philosophy of teaching was straightforward and deeply personal. I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught. Which is to say, I hoped to convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe. I wanted to pass along to students not only the logic but the beauty of math and science. Furthermore, I wanted to do this in a way that would be equally helpful to kids studying a subject for the first time and for adults who wanted to refresh their knowledge; for students grappling with homework and for older people hoping to keep their minds active and supple.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“for All Ages Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD 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”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary? The answer, I think, lies not in the perceive virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day... The broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture... turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“These are the kinds of curious, mysterious, and original minds that often end up making major contributions to our world; to reach their full potential, however, they need the latitude to follow their own oblique, nonstandard paths. That latitude is seldom found in a conventional, box-shaped classroom in which everyone is supposed to be doing the exact same lesson, and “differentness” is generally used as a negative.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“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.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“The world needs all the trained minds and bright futures it can get, and it needs them everywhere.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In a traditional academic model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the comprehension of the concept is variable. Washburne was advocating the opposite. What should be fixed is a high level of comprehension and what should be variable is the amount of time students have to understand a concept.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Alarmist rhetoric aside, the United States is not about to lose its primacy because students in Estonia are better at factoring polynomials. Other aspects of U.S. culture—a unique combination of creativity, entrepreneurship, optimism, and capital—have made it the most fertile ground in the world for innovation. That’s why bright kids from all around the globe dream of getting their green cards to work here.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Even as our world is being daily transformed by breathtaking innovations in science and technology, many people continue to imagine that math and science are mostly a matter of memorizing formulas to get “the right answer.” Even engineering, which is in fact the process of creating something from scratch or putting things together in novel and non-self-evident ways, is perplexingly viewed as a mechanical or rote subject. This viewpoint, frankly, could only be held by people who never truly learned math or science, who are stubbornly installed on one side of the so-called Two Culture divide. The truth is that anything significant that happens in math, science, or engineering is the result of heightened intuition and creativity. This is art by another name, and it’s something that tests are not very good at identifying or measuring. The skills and knowledge that tests can measure are merely warm-up exercises.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Our schools should be the same—environments for safe experimentation, viewing failure as an opportunity for learning rather than a mark of shame.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Education for All Ages Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD 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”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Plato quote that serves as an epigraph for this book: The elements of instruction… should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“the mission statement that has guided Khan Academy since day one: To provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“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.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“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”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“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.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“The teachers, rather than giving broadcast lectures, worked with individual students who needed help. Students who caught on faster assisted those who were struggling. Teachers also had the benefit of forming personal connections with students and getting real feedback on student comprehension. The use of technology had, somewhat ironically, made a traditionally passive classroom interactive and human.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“A shaky understanding early on will lead to complete bewilderment later.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation. —SAINT AUGUSTINE”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“You can standardize curricula, but you can’t standardize learning.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“As we work with the same concept from slightly different angles and investigate questions surrounding it, we build even more and deeper connections. Collectively, this web of connections and associations comprises what we think of informally as understanding.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In one such study, it was observed that students in mastery programs “developed more positive attitudes about learning and about their ability to learn.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible;”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“mastery learning reduces the academic spread between the slower and faster students without slowing down the faster students.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined