Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy is concerned with the modern education system, which originated from the Prussian system of education. Many students struggle in the education system, as they don’t learn in any depth what they are learning, mostly due to inconsistent testing and scale. Sal proposes a “One World Schoolhouse” as a combination of high-quality at-your-own-pace online tutorials followed by assistance from many teachers in a mixed-age classroom.

The current semi-standard education system in the US came to be to largely educate the populace, but its origins from the Prussian system are somewhat interesting:

His motivations were generally forward-thinking for the time; he wanted to provide a solid basic education to students of all socioeconomic ranks. As in Prussia, this would play a significant role in building a middle class capable of filling the jobs of a booming industrial sector. There was, however, also an element of indoctrination that had positives and negatives depending on your point of view. While it would be beyond the scope of this book to examine in detail the political climate of the time, suffice it to say that in the 1840s—as today—the United States was faced with the issue of “Americanizing” large groups of immigrants from many disparate cultures.

He generally brings up flaws in the current education system that I do think need to be resolved. The current education system doesn’t help everyone, just some people. I do think the most stellar students will succeed anyways, but our current system separates out the “gifted” students from the “average” students. He says:

This means putting the “fastest” students in “advanced” or “gifted” classes, the average students in “average” classes, and the slowest students into “remedial” classes. It seems logical… except for the fact that it creates a somewhat permanent intellectual and social division between students.

His solution is to use Khan Academy (or some future tool) to make education more accessible and at the pace of the student. In addition, he wants to throw away the rigid structure of schools, and instead have a mixed-age classrooms with many subjects being taught at once. To do this, there would be many teachers from all sorts of backgrounds to help students succeed in their interests, as well as students helping each other. This approach likely has many benefits, but I worry about effective testing strategies, or approaches to measuring this success. Also, how would you handle students not context-switching effectively? How do you handle the students who are transitioning between the old rigid structure to the new structure? There are many questions without answers, but I find this approach to education promising.

He also states the following rebuttal to a criticism that I had:

I sometimes get pushback from people saying, “Well, this is all well and good, but it will only work for motivated students.” And they say it assuming that maybe 20 percent of students fall into that category. I probably would have agreed with them seven years ago, based on what I’d seen in my own experience with the traditional academic model. When I first started making videos, I thought I was making them only for some subset of students who cared—like my cousins or younger versions of myself. What was truly startling was the reception the lessons received from students whom people had given up on, and who were about to give up on themselves.

I disagree with this, and I still do think that nonmotivated students would struggle or be distracted in environments such as these. His experiments tended to happen in richer schools where funding was high. Students with, say a bad home environment, can be adversarial or difficult, and are often relegated to the worst of schools (in regards to funding and education quality). How do we ensure that these students can also succeed when everything has already been failing them? I do think it’s more of an infrastructural issue that needs to be jointly solved.

One of my favorite quotes in the book:

At the end of the day, however, the fact is that we educate ourselves. We learn, first of all, by deciding to learn, by committing to learning. This commitment allows, in turn, for concentration. Concentration pertains not only to the immediate task at hand but to all the many associations that surround it. All of these processes are active and deeply personal; all involve the acceptance of responsibility. Education doesn’t happen out in the ether, and it doesn’t happen in the empty space between the teacher’s lips and the students’ ears; it happens in the individual brains of each of us.