The One World Schoolhouse

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Introduction

A Free, World-Class Education for Anyone, Anywhere

My name is Sal Khan. I'm the founder and original faculty of the Khan Academy, an institution serious about delivering a free education to anyone, anywhere, and I'm writing this book because I believe that the way we teach and learn is at a once-a-millennium turning point.

The old classroom model simply doesn't fit our changing needs. It's a fundamentally passive way of learning, while the world requires more and more active processing of information. The old model is based on pushing students together in age-group batches with one-pace-fits-all curricula and hoping they pick up something along the way. It isn't clear that this was the best model one hundred years ago; it certainly isn't anymore. Meanwhile, new technologies offer hope for more effective ways of teaching and learning, but also engender confusion and even fear; too often the shiny new technology is used as little more than window dressing.

Between the old way of teaching and the new, there's a crack in the system, and kids around the globe are falling through it every day. The world is changing at an ever faster rate, yet systemic change, when it happens at all, moves glacially and often in the wrong direction; every day—every class period—the gap grows wider between the way kids are being taught and what they actually need to learn.

All of this is easily said, of course. For better and worse, everyone is talking about education these days. Politicians bring it up in every speech. Parents worry aloud that their children are falling behind relative to some vague, mysterious, yet powerful set of standards, or being shown up by a competitor two rows over or halfway around the world. As in arguments about religion, there are fiercely held opinions, often in the absence of verifiable proof. Should kids have more structure or less? Are we testing too little or too much? And speaking of tests, do the standardized exams measure durable learning or just a knack for taking standardized exams? Are we promoting initiative and comprehension and original thinking, or just perpetuating an empty game?

Adults worry on their own behalf as well. What happens to our capacity to learn once our formal education is finished? How can we train our minds so they don't become lazy and brittle? Can we still learn new things? Where and how?

All this talk about education is healthy in that it affirms the absolutely central importance of learning in our competitive and connected world. The problem is that it has not translated into improvement. Where there is action, it often is top-down government policies that are as likely to hurt as help. There are amazing teachers and schools who have shown that excellence is possible, but their success has proven hard to replicate and scale. Despite all the energy and money spent on the problem, the progress dial has barely budged. This has led to a deep cynicism about whether education can be systemically improved at all.

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.

It is often cited that American high school students now rank twenty-third in the world in science and math proficiency. From a U.S.-centric perspective, that's distressing; but these tests are a very narrow measure of what is happening in a country. I believe that, for the near future at least, the United States will maintain its leadership position in science and technology despite any potential failings in our school system. 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. From a global, forward-looking perspective, the national rankings are also somewhat beside the point.

But if alarmism is uncalled for, complacency would be downright disastrous. There's nothing in American DNA that gives us a lock on entrepreneurship and invention, and our leadership position can only erode if we fail to keep it propped up with fresh and well-schooled minds.

Even while America remains a powerhouse of innovation, who will benefit from it? Will only a small fraction of American students have the education they need in order to participate, forcing U.S. companies to import the balance of talent? Will a large and growing percentage of America's own young people remain un-or underemployed because they lack the necessary skills?

The same questions need to be asked on behalf of youth all around the world. Will their potential be squandered or channeled in dangerous directions because they weren't given the tools or the opportunity to grow the economic pie? Will real democracy in the developing world fail to gain a foothold because of bad schools and a corrupt or broken system?

These questions have both practical and moral dimensions. It's my belief that each of us has a stake in the education of all of us. Who knows where genius will crop up? There may be a young girl in an African village with the potential to find a cancer cure. A fisherman's son in New Guinea might have incredible insight into the health of the oceans. Why would we allow their talents to be wasted? How can we justify not offering those children a world-class education, given that the technology and resources to do so are available—if only we can muster the vision and the boldness to make it happen?

But instead of acting, people just keep talking about incremental changes. Either for lack of imagination or fear of rocking the boat, the conversation generally stops well short of the kind of fundamental questioning that our educational malaise demands, focusing instead on a handful of familiar but misplaced obsessions like test scores and graduation rates. Those are by no means trivial concerns. Still, what really matters is whether the world will have an empowered, productive, fulfilled population in the generations to come, one that fully taps into its potential and can meaningfully uphold the responsibilities of real democracy.

As we address this, we will revisit fundamental assumptions. How do people actually learn? Does the standard classroom model—broadcast lectures in school, solitary homework in the evening—still make sense in a digital age? Why do students forget so much of what they have supposedly "learned" as soon as an exam has been taken? Why do grown-ups sense such a disconnect between what they studied in school and what they do in the real world? These are the sorts of basic questions we should be asking. But even then, there is an enormous difference between bemoaning the state of education and actually doing something about it.

In 2004—somewhat by accident, as I'll explain—I started experimenting with some ideas that seemed to be working. To a large degree, they were new incarnations of well-proven principles. On the other hand, coupled with the scalability and accessibility of new technologies, they pointed to the possibility of rethinking education as we know it.

Of the various experiments, the one that took on a life of its own was my posting of math lessons on YouTube. I didn't know how best to do this, or if it would work at all, or if anyone would watch what I posted. I proceeded by trial and error (yes, errors are allowed) and within the time constraints imposed by a rather demanding day job as a hedge fund analyst. But within a few short years it had become clear to me that my passion and my calling were in virtual teaching; in 2009, I quit my job to devote myself full-time to what had by then morphed into the Khan Academy.

If the name was rather grand, the resources available to this new entity were almost comically meager. The Academy owned a PC, $20 worth of screen capture software, and an $80 pen tablet; graphs and equations were drawn—often shakily—with the help of a free program called Microsoft Paint. Beyond the videos, I had hacked together some quizzing software running on my $50-per-month web host. The faculty, engineering team, support staff, and administration consisted of exactly one person: me. The budget consisted of my savings. I spent most of my days in a $6 T-shirt and sweatpants, talking to a computer monitor and daring to dream big.

I didn't dream of creating a popular website or of being a flash-in-the-pan entry in the education debate. Maybe I was delusional, but I dreamed of creating something enduring and transformative, an institution for the world that could last hundreds of years and help us fundamentally rethink how schooling might be done.

The time was right, I thought, for such a fundamental reexamination. New educational institutions and models emerge at inflection points in history. Harvard and Yale were founded shortly after the colonization of North America. MIT, Stanford, and the state university systems were products of the Industrial Revolution and American territorial expansion. We are now still in the early stage of an inflection point that I believe is the most consequential in history: the Information Revolution. And in this revolution, the pace of change is so swift that deep creativity and analytical thinking are no longer optional; they are not luxuries but survival skills. We can no longer afford for only some part of the world's population to be deeply educated. With those things in mind, I composed a mission statement that was both wildly ambitious and—with the help of readily available but absurdly underutilized technology—completely attainable: Provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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.

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, I wanted to restore the excitement—the active participation in learning and the natural high that went with it—that conventional curricula sometimes seemed to bludgeon into submission.

In the earliest days of what would become the Academy, I had one student, Nadia. She happened to be my cousin.

By the middle of 2012, Khan Academy had grown well beyond me. We were helping to educate more than six million unique students per month—more than ten times the number of people who have gone to Harvard since its inception in 1636—and this number was growing by 400 percent per year. The videos had been viewed over 140 million times and students had done nearly half a billion exercises through our software. I had personally posted more than three thousand video lessons—all free, untainted by commercials—covering everything from basic arithmetic to advanced calculus, from physics to finance to biology, from chemistry to the French Revolution. We were also aggressively hiring the best educators and software engineers in the world to help. The Academy had become the most used education platform on the Web, described by Forbes as "one of those why-didn't-anyone-think-of-that stories… [that] is rapidly becoming the most influential teaching organization on the planet." Bill Gates had paid the high compliment of publicly acknowledging that he used the site while working on math problems with his own kids.

This book, in part, is the story of the astonishing acceptance and growth of khanacademy.org—and, more important, what that growth tells us about the world we live in.

A few short years ago, Khan Academy was known only to a handful of middle-school kids—relatives and family friends. How and why, from those intimate beginnings, did awareness of the site spread to a worldwide community of people of all ages and economic conditions who were hungry to learn? Why did students tell their friends and, eventually, their teachers? Why did teachers pass the word to their department heads? Why did parents adopt the site not only as a way to help their children, but also to refresh their own memories and appetite to learn?

In short, what unmet needs was the Academy fulfilling?

Why was the Academy managing to motivate and excite students in ways that conventional curricula had failed to do? As to results, could we demonstrate, with real data, that the Academy was helping people learn? Did it boost test scores? Even more important, did the Academy's way of teaching help people retain real understanding for longer? Did it consistently help students move beyond their grade level in school? Were the video lessons and interactive software most useful as an add-on to the conventional classroom, or were they pointing the way to a fundamentally different future for education—above all, an active and self-paced future?

For each individual student, age eight or eighty, the next video would always be a personal discovery. The next set of problems and exercises would constitute a challenge that each person could approach at his or her own tempo; there would be no shame or stigma in progressing slowly, no dreaded moment when the class must move on. The archive of videos would never go away; students could review and refresh as often as necessary. And mistakes would be allowed! There'd be no fear of disappointing a teacher who is looking over one's shoulder, of appearing dumb in front of a roomful of peers.

I passionately believe that the Khan Academy is a tool that can empower at least an approximate model of what the future of education should look like—a way of combining the art of teaching with the science of presenting information and analyzing data, of delivering the clearest, most comprehensive, and most relevant curriculum at the lowest possible cost. I have many reasons for believing this, some to do with technology, some with economics. But perhaps the most compelling is the feedback we have heard from students.

Over the past few years, we have received thousands of email testimonials from students who have benefited from the Academy. These messages have come from European cities, from American suburbs, from villages in India, from towns in the Middle East where young women, sometimes in secret, are trying to get an education. Some of these emails have been brief and funny; others have been detailed and heartfelt, sometimes from kids who'd been struggling in school and feeling bad about themselves, sometimes from adults who'd feared they'd lost the capacity to learn.

From all these many messages, certain themes have clearly emerged. Far too many bright, motivated kids are being badly served by their educational experiences—ones at elite, wealthy schools as well as underfunded ones. Too many kids are having their confidence trampled; even many "successful" students acknowledge that they've gotten good grades without learning much of anything. Kids and adults alike are having their curiosity drained away by boredom in class or the workplace, and by the unremitting background noise of a dumbed-down pop culture.

For these students, the Khan Academy has been a haven and a refuge, a place where they can do for themselves what their classroom and workplace experiences have failed to do. Can watching video lessons or using interactive software make people smart? No. But I would argue that it can do something even better: create a context in which people can give free rein to their curiosity and natural love of learning, so that they realize they're already smart.

More than anything, it is the student testimonials that have persuaded me to write this book. I think of it as a kind of manifesto—both a very personal statement and a call to arms. Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is; into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.

When and where do people concentrate best? The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the individual. Some people are at their sharpest first thing in the morning. Some are more receptive late at night. One person requires a silent house to optimize his focus; another seems to think more clearly with music playing or against the white noise of a coffee shop. Given all these variations, why do we still insist that the heaviest lifting in teaching and learning should take place in the confines of a classroom and to the impersonal rhythm of bells and buzzers?

Technology has the power to free us from those limitations, to make education far more portable, flexible, and personal; to foster initiative and individual responsibility; to restore the treasure-hunt excitement to the process of learning. Technology offers another potential benefit as well: The Internet can make education far, far more accessible, so knowledge and opportunity can be more broadly and equitably shared. Quality education need not be dependent on showplace campuses. There is no economic reason that students everywhere could not have access to the same lessons as Bill Gates's kids.

There's an old saying that life is school. If that's true, then it's also true that as our world grows smaller and the people in it more inextricably connected, the world itself comes to resemble one vast, inclusive schoolhouse. There are younger people and older people, people farther or less far along in their education on a given subject. At every moment, we are both students and teachers; we learn by studying, but we also learn by helping others, by sharing and explaining what we know.

I like to think of Khan Academy as a virtual extension of this One World Schoolhouse. It's a place where all are welcome, all are invited to teach as well as learn, and all are encouraged to do the best they can. Success is self-defined; the only failure lies in giving up. Speaking for myself, I have learned as much from the Academy as I have taught. I have gotten back—in intellectual pleasure, refreshed curiosity, and a sense of connection to other minds and other people—more than I have put in. It's my hope that every Academy student and every reader of this book will be able to say the same.

PART 1

Learning to Teach

Teaching Nadia

This story starts with one student and one teacher. It begins as a family story, so let me tell you a bit about my background.

I was born in Metairie, Louisiana, a residential area within metro New Orleans. My father, a pediatrician, had moved there from Bangladesh for his medical residency at LSU and, later, his practice at Charity Hospital. In 1972, he briefly returned to Bangladesh and came back with my mother—who was born in India. It was an arranged marriage, very traditional (my mother tried to peek during the ceremony to make sure she was marrying the brother she thought she was). Over the next several years, five of my mother's brothers and one cousin came to visit, and they all fell in love with the New Orleans area. I believe that they did this because Louisiana was as close to South Asia as the United States could get; it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government. We were a close family—even though, at any given moment, half of my relatives weren't speaking to the other half.

Still, a family wedding was a big occasion, so when I got married in 2004, more than forty relatives made the long trip to New Jersey, where my wife's family lived. One of them was my cousin Nadia.

Today, Nadia is a pre-med junior at Sarah Lawrence College. But in 2004 she was a very serious-minded twelve-year-old who had just had the first academic setback of her life. She'd done poorly on a math placement exam given at the end of sixth grade. She was a straight-A student, highly motivated, always prepared. Her subpar performance baffled her. It wounded her pride, her confidence, and her self-esteem.

By the time we spoke after my wedding, Nadia had actually come to accept the outcome of that test. She believed that she just wasn't good at math. I saw it very differently. I saw real potential in her. She was logical, creative, and tenacious. I was already viewing her as a future computer scientist or mathematician. It seemed inconceivable to me that she, of all people, would find something in the sixth grade difficult.

Having gone through the traditional academic system, it was also clear to me that being placed in the slower math class could be the kiss of death for her mathematical future. Because of "tracking"—a subject we'll have occasion to come back to—this one test result would have huge ramifications for Nadia's academic destiny. If she didn't get into the more advanced track, she wouldn't be able to take algebra in eighth grade. If she didn't take algebra in eighth grade, she wouldn't be able to take calculus in twelfth. And so on, down a slippery slope that would leave her far short of her potential.

But a botched test was a botched test. Was there anything to be done about it? Nadia's mother didn't think so, and during a post-wedding visit to Boston, where I lived and worked, it became clear that she was very distressed. So I made a somewhat rash offer. If Nadia's school would let her retake the exam, I would tutor her, remotely, when she was back in New Orleans. As to exactly how I would tutor her… well, that was a work in progress.

Let me be clear—I think it's essential for everything that follows—that at the start this was all an experiment, an improvisation. I'd had no teacher training, no Big Idea for the most effective way to teach. I did feel that I understood math intuitively and holistically, but this was no guarantee that I'd be effective as a teacher. I'd had plenty of professors who knew their subject cold but simply weren't very good at sharing what they knew. I believed, and still believe, that teaching is a separate skill—in fact, an art that is creative, intuitive, and highly personal.

But it isn't only an art. It has, or should have, some of the rigor of science as well. I felt that I could experiment with different techniques to see what worked and what didn't, that with time I could develop myself into an effective tutor for Nadia. It was an intellectual challenge not too different from those I faced in the investing or technology worlds, but this one had the very real potential to empower someone I cared about.

I had no preconceived notions about how people learned; I was constrained by no orthodoxy regarding the "right" way to do things. I was feeling my way for how best to convey information and to employ the available technology. In short, I was starting from square one, without habits or assumptions. It's not just that I was thinking outside the box; for me, there was no box. I tried things and I saw what worked. By extension, I also inferred what hadn't been working.

Actually, I did bring a few assumptions into my approach to working with Nadia, though they were based on personal experience rather than on any sort of pedagogic theory. During my own school years I'd felt that some teachers were more interested in showing off what they knew than in communicating it to me. Their tone was often impatient, occasionally arrogant and even condescending. Other teachers were scripted to the point that it didn't feel like they were actually even thinking. I wanted our tutorial sessions to be a safe, personal, comfortable, thought-provoking experience. I wanted to be a tutor who genuinely shared his thinking and expressed it in a conversational style, as if I was speaking to an equal who was fundamentally smart but just didn't fully understand the material at hand.

I firmly believed that Nadia, and most people, could understand the math. I didn't want her to memorize and I certainly didn't want her to compartmentalize. I was convinced that if she understood the conceptual underpinnings of mathematics, the flow of one idea to the next, everything else would be easy.

In any case, the first step in tutoring Nadia was to figure out what aspect of the math test had given her trouble. It turned out that she had stumbled on the concept of unit conversion. This surprised me. Unit conversion—figuring out how many feet in six miles, or how many ounces in three pints, and so forth—was a fairly straightforward notion. You learned a few terms—kilo for a thousand, centi for a hundredth—and the rest of the factors you could easily look up. From there it was a simple matter of multiplication or division. Nadia had done just fine with far subtler concepts in math.

So why did she have trouble with unit conversion? She didn't know, and neither did I. But let's think about a few of the possible reasons that she might not have "gotten" this particular topic.

Maybe she was absent on the day it was introduced in class. Maybe she was physically present but not at her best. Maybe she was sleepy, or had a bellyache, or was upset about an argument with her mom. Maybe she had an exam in the class that came next, and was cramming for that instead of paying attention. Maybe she had a crush on a boy two rows over and was daydreaming about him. Maybe her teacher was in a hurry to move on and just didn't explain it very well.

These are only conjectures; the point is that there are any number of things that might have prevented Nadia from catching on to unit conversion, and that once the concept had passed her by, it wasn't coming back in class. That module had been covered. Those problems had been worked on and erased. There was a curriculum to follow, a schedule to keep; the class had to move on.

Let's take a moment to consider this. It so happened that Nadia attended a fine prep school, with an excellent student/teacher ratio and quite small class sizes. Class size, of course, is an obsession among those who believe that our standard educational model would work just fine if only we could afford more teachers, more buildings, more textbooks, more computers—more of everything except students, so that class sizes could be reduced (essentially making poor schools look more like rich ones). Now, no one is against