Khan is well on his way towards being one of the more important figures of our time, particularly when you consider the "meta" nature of the problem he's solving. Khan's book is a compellingly written exposition of past and current problems with our educational system and his vision for the future of education. I'd want my future children (all 12 of them) to get an education along the lines of what Khan describes.

Khan's book is broken into three main categories. The first is his own theory of effectiveness in education. He blasts the idea that grades like 70% or 80% are passing. In Khan-land, the only passing grade is 100% - total mastery of a subject. He thinks this is critical for avoiding "Swiss cheese learning" - an incomplete understanding of a topic that is especially damaging in fields like math. Other thoughts of his include: stop "balkanizing" subjects and pretending that things aren't connected; human interaction is critical in education; interaction between children of different ages is important for social and leadership development.

The second topic is about the history of education. In this he talks about the importance of apprenticeships for trades in the middle ages - continuing up to the training of PhDs, doctors, and other skilled professionals in the modern day. He delves into the origin of our modern "industrial" educational system in 1700's Prussia - a system that was more geared towards political conformity than learning. Khan also points out the enormity of waste in modern education - more than half of school budgets go to things like security guards, football fields, and administrators.

His final section is about his vision for the future. Khan sees a world in which technology allows students to move at their own pace and learn in ways that are most effective for them. And surprisingly, he's against total automation of the classroom. If anything, he pushes for MORE human interaction. One of his most famous contributions in this regard is the idea of the "flipped" classroom where kids listen to lectures at home and then do "homework" at school where they can interact with their peers and teachers. He also stresses the importance of widespread quality education for well-functioning democracy: "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"

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I've included some of my favorite quotes below:

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. From a global, forward-looking perspective, the national rankings are also somewhat beside the point.

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.

The other thing that has changed—and this is huge—is that technology has radically lowered the expenses formerly associated with mastery learning. No more paper workbooks. No more pricey printings of individualized exercises. Everything needed for self-paced learning is right there in the computer; the cost of delivering it to students is miniscule.

I’m not just nitpicking here. I believe that the breaking up of concepts like these has profound and even crucial consequences for how deeply students learn and how well they remember. It is the connections among concepts—or the lack of connections—that separate the students who memorize a formula for an exam only to forget it the next month and the students who internalize the concepts and are able to apply them when they need them a decade later.

In gradually developing my own approach to teaching, one of my central objectives was to reverse this balkanizing tendency. In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow.

Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation. —SAINT AUGUSTINE

Portability and self-pacing, then, are essential aids to active, self-motivated learning. For a student to truly take ownership of his education, however, there’s another resource that’s required: easy and ongoing access to the lessons that have come before. This is where Internet-based learning offers a huge advantage over textbooks and other conventional materials. The lessons never disappear.

Significantly, the apprentice system marked the first time in human history that the main responsibility for education was shifted away from the family; this, of course, gave rise to a debate that has never yet died down about the respective roles of parents versus outside authorities in the education of children. Absent the bonds of family affection, the apprentice system was also the first time there was a clear, hierarchical distinction between the master/teacher and the apprentice/student. The master taught and ruled; the student submitted and learned.

Many associate the apprentice system with artisans like blacksmiths or carpenters, but it has also historically been the primary mode of education for future scholars and artists. In fact, even today’s doctoral programs are really apprenticeships where a junior researcher (the PhD candidate) learns by doing research under and alongside a professor. Medical residency programs are also really apprenticeships.

A law degree didn’t become a mainstream credential in the United States until the late 1800s, when the completion of postgraduate instruction became a requirement for admission to the bar.2 The idea that a college degree is a prerequisite to any professional career is a quite new one, only about a hundred years old. The idea that college is needed for everyone in order to be productive members of society is only a few decades old.

Clearly, our universities are still wrestling with an ancient but false dichotomy between the abstract and the practical, between wisdom and skill. 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.

In terms of making knowledge available to the many, the most important technology since spoken language has been written text.

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity. —JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

To those not in the field, it may come as a surprise to learn that all these then-radical innovations in what we now call K-12 education were first put in place in eighteenth-century Prussia. Prussia—with its stiff whiskers, stiff hats, and stiff way of marching in lockstep—is where our basic classroom model was invented. 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. 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.”

To address this issue, the National Education Association formed the “Committee of Ten” in 1892. This was a group of educators—primarily university presidents—led by Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, whose mission was to determine what primary and secondary education should be like. It was these ten men who decided that everyone in the United States should—starting at age six and ending at age eighteen—have eight years of elementary education followed by four years of high school. They decided that English, math, and reading should be covered every year, while chemistry and physics should be introduced near the end of high school. For the most part, the recommendations of the Committee of Ten were refreshingly progressive for the time. For example, the committee felt that every student should get a fair chance to see if he had an interest in and capacity for intellectual work. In most of the world—and this is still true today—subjects like trigonometry, physics, or literature were reserved for the very top students destined for professional careers; the bulk of students were tracked into purely vocational courses around eighth grade. I also really like what they had to say about teaching math, the spirit of which has been lost in many of today’s schools.

Attacks from the left have tended to be surprisingly similar in tone, though the villain is not the government but the corporations that have the most to gain from a well-behaved and conformist population. Writing in the September 2003 issue of Harper’s, John Taylor Gatto urged that we “wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands…. School trains children to be employees and consumers.”

Let’s consider a few things about that inevitable test. What constitutes a passing grade? In most classrooms in most schools, students pass with 75 or 80 percent. This is customary. But if you think about it even for a moment, it’s unacceptable if not disastrous. Concepts build on one another. Algebra requires arithmetic. Trigonometry flows from geometry. Calculus and physics call for all of the above. A shaky understanding early on will lead to complete bewilderment later. And yet we blithely give out passing grades for test scores of 75 or 80. For many teachers, it may seem like a kindness or perhaps merely an administrative necessity to pass these marginal students. In effect, though, it is a disservice and a lie. We are telling students they’ve learned something that they really haven’t learned.

Another consequence of Swiss cheese learning is the very common but perplexing inability of many people—even very bright people with top-tier educations—to connect what they have studied in the classroom to questions they encounter in the outside world.

There is another unintended and undesirable side effect of homework as it is usually assigned and generally understood. Traditional homework is a driver of inequality, and in this regard it runs directly counter both to the stated aims of public education and to our sense of fairness. Insofar as parents can help with homework, moms and dads who are themselves well educated obviously have a huge advantage. Even when the homework help is indirect, households with books and families with a tradition of educational success have an unfair edge. Wealthier kids are less likely to be burdened with after-school jobs or chores that single parents—or exhausted parents—can’t perform. In short, homework contributes to an unlevel playing field in which, educationally speaking, the rich get richer

As gratifying as these results were to us, it was equally pleasing to tap one more nail into the coffin of tracking. Our underserved, underperforming, and purportedly “slow” kids were now operating at the same—or higher—level as their more affluent peers. I want to emphasize this last point. Remedial math classes are often viewed as something of an academic graveyard. Once students are deemed “slow,” they tend to fall farther and farther behind their peers. Now, all of a sudden, we were seeing that students who were put in the “slower” math classes could actually leapfrog ahead of their “non-slow” peers. Even better, the experience with both the fifth and seventh graders showed that there really was no reason to track students into separate classrooms to begin with.

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

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.

Before the Industrial Revolution, it was very much the exception to lump schoolkids together by age; it just wasn’t practical, given that most people lived on farms and the population was spread very thin. With industrialization came urbanization, and the new population density set the stage for multiroom schools. Kids needed to be divided up somehow, and forming classes by age seemed a logical choice. But there was a whole raft of implications that went along with sequestering kids by age, and these have turned out to be a very mixed blessing.

Take away this mix of ages and everybody loses something. Younger kids lose heroes and idols and mentors. Perhaps even more damagingly, older kids are deprived of a chance to be leaders, to exercise responsibility, and are thereby infantilized.

I believe that a big part of the reason kids revere and obey their coaches is that the coaches are specifically and explicitly on the student’s side.

In fact, the only way to do it would be to make clear that what happens in the classroom is but preparation for real competition in the outside world... The teacher, like a coach, needs to emphasize that anything less than mastery won’t do because he or she expects you to be the best thinker and creator that you can be.

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 world needs all the trained minds and bright futures it can get, and it needs them everywhere.

Waterloo has already proven that the division between the intellectual and the useful is artificial; I challenge anyone to argue that Waterloo co-op students are in any way less intellectual or broad-thinking than the political science or history majors from other elite universities. If anything, based on my experience with Waterloo students, they tend to have a more expansive worldview and are more mature than typical new college graduates—arguably due to their broad and deep experience base.

Neither the great mathematicians’ nor the great writers’ goal was to create tools of torture for high school or college students—but that is how many students have grown to view their work.

Going back to the very beginning of this book, one of the many things that has made America the most fertile soil for innovation is that it does not stigmatize risk and failure anywhere near as much as the rest of the world

The One World Schoolhouse - Likewise Book Reviews

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