What should the perfect school look like?
This is one of the questions Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy, addresses in his book “The One World Schoolhouse.” He argues that the current system, which allocates a fixed amount of time for each subject after which “the class must move on,” leaves holes in students' understanding that impede future learning.
Sal also recounts the origins of Khan Academy, which is yet another story of a young man who, working alone in a garage (or in this case a closet), created a product that has improved the lives of millions of people. It is also the story of how that product almost failed due to lack of funding, even after it gained prominence and was being used by many people.
The book is also interesting because it was published a decade ago, providing present-day readers with additional perspective. When reading the book, the reader is left with the feeling that we are on the cusp of a revolution. And yet, ten years later, that revolution has not materialized. As usual, it turns out that changing the world is hard work.
But Sal’s writing is engaging and his ideas are worth reading, even a decade later. His book is thoughtful and earnest, the musings of an analyst who left a lucrative career to teach math to children and found a calling that led him in unexpected directions.
Sal’s journey began when he was asked to tutor his cousin Nadia:
“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.”
The school agreed to let Nadia retake the test, and so began Sal’s first attempt at teaching. Because they lived in different cities, Sal began experimenting with different methods of remote teaching using Yahoo Doodle and telephone conversations.
Sal soon discovered Nadia’s main difficulty was with unit conversion. She did not understand the topic when it was taught in class, and it became a hole in her knowledge when the class moved on to other topics. While she understood most other topics, “when it came to unit conversion, her brain just seemed to shut down. (...) Like many people who’d had difficulty with a particular subject, she’d told herself she’d never get it, and that was that.” Sal helped her with both the math and the self-confidence problems.
Needless to say, the tutoring worked wonderfully and Nadia passed her test. In fact, it was so successful that Sal was roped into tutoring more of his family and friends. Soon, he had more students than he could manage. A friend suggested recording the lessons and posting them on YouTube so each student could watch at their convenience.
“At once, I saw that the idea was… ridiculous! YouTube? YouTube was for cats playing the piano, not serious mathematics. (...) Some three thousand videos later, I still wish I’d thought of it myself.”
Those videos ultimately became Khan Academy: A collection of short education videos explaining math starting at an elementary school level and going on through high school. As the content has grown, the videos have also expanded to other subjects beyond math and to include exercises as well.
Partly by luck, Sal's videos were highly effective for several reasons. He made each video ten minutes long because that was the limit for video uploads, but it is also roughly the length of a person’s attention span. Also, he made the videos with just scribbles on a blackboard instead of showing his face because he didn’t want to invest in a camera and clothes, but that helped reduce distractions.
Most importantly, the videos along with the exercises encouraged “mastery learning.” That is, students can move through a lesson as fast or as slow as they need, but they don’t move on to the next subject until they have fully understood the current one. This contrasts with traditional learning where each subject is allocated a fixed amount of time and at the end of that time “the class must move on” whether everyone got it or not.
Finally, Khan Academy allows students to take ownership of and responsibility for their learning, which makes the students active participants and helps with the formation of long-term memory.
My first reaction to Sal’s tale was: I could have totally done that! It's just a bunch of YouTube videos. And he didn’t even bother putting any cats in the videos…
Many startups require specialized technical skills. For instance, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had to invent the PageRank algorithm and build the infrastructure needed to support their search engine. Probably only a handful of people could have accomplished that. But explaining elementary school math? Couldn’t almost anyone have done that?
The answer is probably not. First of all, a lot of people may understand an idea but struggle to explain it. Explaining something usually requires both a deep level of understanding and a certain skill at teaching, which is its own art.
Second, Khan’s innovation came at the right time. Ten years before, not enough students would have had the fast internet connections needed to watch videos. Ten years later, the idea would have already been done.
Also, there is always a big luck component. Someone who wanted to go out there and “change the world” could have done so by making math videos, building a $10 laptop, using a radio telescope to search for aliens, or one of thousands of other mutually exclusive pursuits. In retrospect it is always clear which ones were worthwhile, but good luck choosing beforehand!
But most important of all, Sal was able to rapidly produce a large library of videos so that he reached a critical mass of content. His videos are far from perfect: there are ums and coughs and whatnot, but he kept on going forward. If I had been in his position, I would have spent an enormous amount of time planning, reshooting, and perfecting each video, probably only producing a few of them in total. But the breadth of Khan Academy’s offerings is one of its strengths. The ability to create things that are good enough rather than perfect was a skill that served Sal well.
The other part of Sal’s story that I find striking is how little financial support he began with. He started recording educational videos as a hobby, and even with this limited effort Khan Academy grew rapidly. In 2009, he decided to quit his job at a hedge fund, and work on Khan Academy full time as a not-for-profit.
“My son had just been born, my wife was still in training; it seemed irresponsible even to consider quitting my job.”
[Note to my younger self: You probably just glossed over the “my son had just been born” sentence as a minor detail. It is not. Quitting a stable job to follow your dream as a young bachelor is some combination of brave and foolish. Quitting a stable job when you just had a child is either heroic, insane, or both.]
It turns out that while Sal was a good teacher, he was not a good fundraiser. After quitting his finance job, he was still doing all the Khan Academy work by himself while simultaneously trying and failing to acquire funding. Without any external source of income, his personal expenses were rapidly eating into his savings. He was about to give up and start looking for a new job when he got a donation of $10,000 from Ann Doerr, wife of venture capitalist John Doerr. She also invited him for lunch:
“We talked about what Khan Academy could be. When Ann asked how I was supporting myself and my family, I answered, trying not to sound too desperate, “I’m not; we’re living off of savings.” She nodded and we each went our way. About twenty minutes later, I got a text message as I was parking in my driveway. It was from Ann: You need to support yourself. I am sending a check for $100,000 right now. I almost crashed into the garage door.”
That donation set in motion a chain of events that eventually got the project a few million dollars. In particular, some two months later “Bill Gates was onstage at the Aspen Ideas Festival talking about how he was a fan of Khan Academy and was using it for his own learning and for his kids,” and shortly afterwards he became one of the first large donors.
So Khan Academy had become so big that a famous tech person was not only using it with his kids but also raving about it in public, and yet it was so underfunded that its single employee was about to quit. Now, it is not strictly Bill Gates’ responsibility to seek out and fund every promising not-for-profit, even though in the end he did sort of save the day. But if his kids had been slightly older or younger, or needed help with a different subject, Khan Academy might have disappeared before it reached its potential.
It is sad to think about how close Khan Academy came to shutting down. I wonder how many other potentially world-changing efforts failed because of a lack of funding at a crucial moment. Maybe the full funding required a foundation or a billionaire, but the initial funding could in principle just have been some 10% charity donations from a few people working in tech: 10% of 3 senior engineers at $200k/y is $60k/y, which is roughly what Sal was spending.
Of course, most people are not good at picking successful ventures and would better serve the world by donating their charity money to GiveWell or some equivalent. Which leaves the question of why as a society are we so bad at funding enterprises like Khan Academy and how can we do better? I am hopeful that the recent set of new grants programs (Fast Grants, ACX Grants, etc.) can fill this void.
Almost everyone agrees that schools are broken in some way, though the causes and solutions seem to depend on one's political alignment. I would argue, though, that if students feel the need to spend their free time re-learning math on Khan Academy, then something is not optimal.
However, the principle of Chesterton's fence tells us that we should not attempt to change something without understanding why it has its current form. As such, before offering his suggestions for improvements, Sal tries to briefly cover the history of how schools came to be the way we are used to. He claims that they have not evolved much from their initial design, and yet that design was chosen for a vastly different goal than the one most people currently believe schools should serve.
“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. (...) 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.”
Sal’s discussion of the history of education frequently quotes John Taylor Gatto, a teacher and writer with strong anti-school views, who says “It was not by accident that whole ideas were broken up into fragmented ‘subjects.’ Subjects could be learned by rote memorization, whereas mastering larger ideas called for free and unbridled thinking.” Furthermore, “our sacred notion of the ‘class period’ was put in place ‘so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.’” I’m not sure all historians would agree with this characterization, though.
Nevertheless, many of the ideas of the Prussian system were imported into the US during the nineteenth century, and in 1892, a group of educators known as the “Committee of Ten” standardized the education model for all states in the US:
“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.”
A lot of these choices have remained unchanged over the past century, in many cases through inertia. For instance, summer vacation was important during our agrarian past, but is not obviously a necessary component of school in the twenty-first century. However, given that there are whole industries built out of the existence of summer vacation, it is unlikely to go away anytime soon.
Throughout the book Sal talks about what he views as broken in the current system and how he would fix it. Some of his ideas are:
Swiss cheese learning vs. mastery learning: A passing grade in a typical school is “75 or 80 percent.” That means students are passing while having not understood one fifth of the material. He notes that for subjects that build on themselves like math, this can cause serious problems later on.
In 2007, Sal was invited to try his videos at a summer camp for middle-school kids from underresourced schools, which led to an interesting experiment:
“The first decision was the question of where in math the kids should start. The Academy math curriculum began, literally, with 1 + 1 = 2. But the campers were mainly sixth to eighth graders. True, most of them had serious gaps in their understanding of math and many were working below their grade level. Still, wouldn’t it be a bit insulting and a waste of time to start them with basic addition? I thought so, and so I proposed beginning at what would normally be considered fifth-grade material, in order to allow for some review. To my surprise, however, two of the three teachers who were actually implementing the plan said they preferred to start at the very beginning. Since the classes had been randomly chosen, we thereby ended up with a small but classic controlled experiment.”
By the end of the summer, the “1 + 1” groups did significantly better than the other one because they were able to fill in the gaps in their earlier learning.
The idea of mastery learning is that it would be better to go slower when necessary and be sure to have a solid foundation, even if that means covering slightly less material. This seems right for math, though I’m not sure if this is true for every subject. Maybe it would be better to know subjects like photosynthesis at an 80 percent level, if that allowed extra time to study more subjects. After all, there is no such thing as mastering photosynthesis; there is always more one can know. But even a vague notion of “plants need sunlight and use it to make oxygen” might be useful.
Tracking: Sal talks a lot about tracking in his book, and he is generally against it, in part because of his cousin Nadia’s experience. He notes that sorting into tracks is often done with a single high-stakes test that is both potentially inaccurate and misses qualities like creativity.
Sal discusses a student in his summer camp whom he believes would have been ill-served by tracking:
“There was one seventh-grade girl—I’ll call her Marcela—whose results were especially striking. At the start of camp, Marcela was among the least advanced of the students, and during the first half of the summer session her progress was among the slowest; she was working through roughly half as many concepts as the average student. In particular, she was spending an inordinate amount of time wrestling with the concepts of adding and subtracting negative numbers; she was about as stuck as stuck could get. Then something clicked. I don’t know exactly how it happened, and neither did her classroom teacher; that’s part of the wonderful mystery of human intelligence. She had one of those Aha moments, and from then on she progressed faster than nearly anyone else in the class. At the end of the program, she was the second most advanced of all the students. Moreover, she was showing mathematical intuitions that hinted at a genuine gift; she ended up breezing through complex topics that most of her peers—even the ones that thought they were “good” at math—struggled with.”
Presumably in a traditional school with tracks, Marcela would have been sorted into the lower track and stayed there, missing out on opportunities for greater learning.
However, while most people who are opposed to tracking want all students learning together, Sal’s proposal is closer to “maximal tracking,” where every student is on their own personal track. If the personal track is constantly adjusting to the student, this solves the sorting problem and allows students to move up (or down) as needed.
This maximal tracking system is appealing, though it may not fix all the problems with tracking. Another commonly cited problem with tracking is that there is a demotivating stigma associated with the lower tracks, and this might persist even with an individualized tracking system.
The one-room schoolhouse: A traditional school groups its students by age, which is simple and legible, but not necessarily optimal. Many classrooms also tend to be quiet, with the teacher speaking and the students looking forward. Sal has a very different vision of a boisterous mixed-age classroom:
“The ideal classroom, in my opinion, would look and sound quite different.
As I’ve said, I would group together as many as a hundred students of widely varying ages. They would seldom if ever all be doing the same thing at the same time. And while nooks and alcoves within this imagined school might be perfectly quiet for private study, other parts would be bustling with collaborative chatter.
At a given moment, perhaps one-fifth of the students would be doing computer-based lessons and exercises aimed at a deep and durable grasp of core concepts (...) with one of our team teachers circulating among them, answering questions, troubleshooting difficulties as they occur. The feedback and the help are virtually immediate, and the twenty-to-one ratio is augmented by peer-to-peer tutoring and mentoring—a central advantage of the age-mixed classroom.
What of the other eighty students?
I can see (and hear!) a boisterous subgroup learning economics and trying out market simulations by way of board games such as those we’ve used with good effect at our summer camps.
I would have another group, divided into teams, building robots or designing mobile apps or testing out novel ways for structures to capture sunlight.
A quiet corner or room could be devoted to students working on art or creative writing projects. A less quiet corner would be reserved for those working on original music. Clearly, it would be an advantage to have a team teacher with particular affinities for those fields.
The most important aspect of this is that it would carve out space and time for open-ended thinking and creativity for all students.”
He notes that “Given the greatly increased efficiency of self-paced, mastery-based learning, one or two hours [of computer based learning] is enough, and this should ease the concerns of any technophobes out there who fear that technology-based education means that kids would sit numbly in front of computer screens all day.”
Some of Sal’s vision is not that different from that of a progressive school, possibly with a little more technology and more mixing of ages. Having older students tutor younger ones sounds interesting, but I wonder how well that would work in practice. I was a smart kid in school but I was truly awful at explaining things to others.
Expanding to poorer areas: Sal discusses how tools like Khan Academy might potentially be even more impactful in poorer countries:
“If computer-based learning has the power to transform education in the developed world, it is potentially even a bigger game-changer in the developing world. Consider an analogy with cell phones. Cell phones have changed life everywhere, but they have positively revolutionized it in the developing world. Why? Because the developing world had so few landlines. For most people there, cell phones aren’t just an add-on, they are it. As with telephones, so with education—the more egregiously that people were underserved before, the more revolutionary an improvement they will experience.”
He notes that equipping every child with an internet connected laptop seems like a daunting challenge. But he says that lessons can be distributed on usb sticks and laptops can be shared: if the computer part of learning only takes a couple of hours a day, then a single laptop can be used by three or four students. Based on a quick estimate, he suggested this might cost as little as $11 per student per year.
Other ideas: Sal discusses year-round education with everyone taking vacations at different times, which would be fine in a one-room schoolhouse environment. He talks about how micro-certificates for demonstrating individual skills could replace diplomas and credentials. Sal finally talks about how with an online learning portal like Khan Academy, learning can be a lifelong passion for grownups even after graduating college.
While I agree with many of his ideas, I worry that the “one-room schoolhouse” idea might be too much of a big change, with pitfalls that we don’t fully understand. But I think that a regular school, enhanced with learning through Khan Academy, could be a good compromise between the traditional lecture-based model of education and the very progressive model of John Holt (author of “How children fail”). It could give students the opportunity to go at their own pace and dive deeper into the subjects they find most interesting, while offering an educational scaffolding that sets up clear milestones and a path to get to them.
The story in the book has a strong feeling of momentum: Sal used these techniques in a summer camp and it went really well, and then a few schools reached out to incorporate the material into their curriculum and that was also a success. Meanwhile the user base of the online platform keeps growing and some very serious donors are now backing the cause.
One is left with the expectation that we are witnessing the birth of another Amazon, Google or Facebook, and that this will inevitably revolutionize education. But it is now ten years after the book was written, and while Khan Academy is known by many, it has not quite had the impact that one would have guessed from the book. It still seems to be primarily an add-on or tutoring supplement.
I recently spent some time looking for a school for my son, a search that included multiple private and public schools, and not a single school near me advertises that they use Khan Academy in any way, nor do they use a competitor that offers a similar product. In fact, today’s curricula do not seem substantially changed from before Khan Academy was created. And that seems true even though over the past couple of years we had a global pandemic that forced most students to learn in a virtual format. The pandemic seems like the perfect time to have tried out “flipping the classroom”: distributing pre-recorded lessons and then using Zoom meetings for questions and discussions. But instead, many schools continued business as usual, but on Zoom.
So what happened over the past ten years? The Wikipedia page for Khan Academy is surprisingly short, especially in the history section. It seems like there has been more content added and more translations created, and a Khan Academy based school was opened in Mountain View in 2014. The Khan Academy website mentions various tests and partnerships in New England, Guatemala and Sri Lanka, but most of them sound like small scale deployments and often as supplemental material.
This article discusses a recent large-scale test in the Las Vegas area that sadly got sidetracked due to the pandemic. Still, it seems like a mixed bag: Some teachers are very excited about the new tools and are deploying them successfully, while others are quite skeptical and may not be using them to their full potential. For instance, in the example below it seems like all the students are working on the same skill, which negates some of the “go at your own pace” and “rewatch as many times as you need” benefit of the videos:
“His teacher, Leila Cryer, a long-term substitute, had asked him and his classmates, all of whom struggled to keep up in math, to practice fractions on the Khan tool while using the previous day’s class notes as a guide. (Teachers can assign specific topics if they prefer the whole class practice the same skill.)”
I would really love to see a follow-up book from Sal, describing his successes and failures over the last ten years. It would be interesting to know what worked and what didn’t and what ultimately are the biggest obstacles to reforming education. It seems that the technological part was ultimately not that hard, but “disrupting the status quo” is as difficult as ever.
Even if the US has a hard-to-change education system, it is worth pondering why Khan Academy hasn’t caught on somewhere else. After all, it turns out there are over a hundred countries out there somewhere. Probably at least one country could benefit by using a tool like Khan Academy, even if all they did was replace their regular math lessons with a mastery learning approach. Sadly, while it does seem that the Khan Academy foundation has been trying to expand to as many places as possible, the obstacles elsewhere may not be any easier to surmount than those at home.
One of the ways in which Khan Academy has expanded since the book was written is by creating the Khan Academy Kids app, intended for ages two to eight. It is a free app that works on a variety of devices and delivers educational games and stories that adapt to the level of the child. The app is very polished and has a large library of content.
[Did I mention it is free? I’m not sure why this is so important given that even a used low-end tablet costs $50, and surely one should be willing to pay an extra 10% to put quality software on it, but somehow paying $5 for an app always seems too much.]
I watched my son use this app for many hours when he was three years old, and it is both engaging and educational. But it does have its limits. For instance, one game for three year olds has a bunch of letters at the top of the screen, a fish-bowl at the bottom, and you are given the verbal instructions “put all the letters k into the bowl.” The problem happens when the child puts two of the k’s in the bowl, but is still missing one. At this point he gets confused and frustrated. Why hasn’t the app acknowledged his success and moved him on to the next game? To me, sitting nearby, the problem is obvious and if I say “Good job putting those letters in the bowl, but I think you missed one,” he quickly fixes the problem. But without a grown-up nearby, all he can do is ask the app for help, which dutifully repeats the original instructions “put all the letters k into the bowl.” Of course, this isn’t useful because he doesn’t know if the problem is that he selected the wrong letter, or put them in the wrong place, or the app is just broken. If finding k’s was easy for him, he wouldn’t be doing this activity.
Sadly, my son got bored of the app a long time ago and now rarely uses it. When we tried to learn reading, we ultimately used the book “Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons,” which is very traditional with its structured lessons that one is supposed to follow at a precise pace. As much as I’m excited about the Khan Academy ecosystem, I’m not sure how I could have used it to help my son learn to read.
At some level, what the app still needs is someone that can look at the state of the activity, try to infer what is going through the child’s head, and offer advice that is helpful but still lets the child solve the problem and learn from the experience. Right now that means a parent or a teacher sitting nearby. In a “one-room schoolhouse” that could also be an older student. But my personal dream is that in the not too distant future, we might have a good enough AI that can do the job. Creating an AI that could give exactly the right kind of hints, just enough to get the user unstuck without giving away the full answer to an exercise, is a very hard problem to solve. But if it could be done, then it would be a huge game changer at every level from preschool to college.
To some, replacing teachers with AIs may seem dystopian. Sal makes the point many times throughout the book that his goal is to work alongside teachers rather than replace them. I suspect this is in part a necessity: to get his ideas into schools he needs the cooperation of the teachers, and they will not be cooperative if his goal is to get rid of them.
But even if we had a fully-online learning platform with a smart AI, we would still need something resembling schools and teachers. After all, students need to socialize with other students. And at least for the younger children, parents need a safe place to leave their kids while they work, which is also an important function of schools. For kindergarteners, learning from a computer can probably be at most a small part of a day that would also need to include the traditional circle time, arts and crafts and free play. For high-schoolers, computers could probably replace a larger fraction of lectures and exercises, though there will always be a need for in-person discussion groups, etc.
Also many of the students who currently use Khan Academy are very self-motivated, but there are other students who may struggle with motivation and need someone to keep them on track. Sal’s cousin Nadia’s problem wasn’t just trouble with math but also trouble with self-confidence, and it was resolved not by a computer program but by the coaching and reassurance of a trusted adult. Even if all lectures were replaced with something like Khan Academy, we would still need teachers to serve as mentors and role models, motivators and cheerleaders, and also keepers of the peace. This is not that different from Sal’s vision for teachers in his “one room schoolhouse” model.
To me, making sure that everyone gets a really good education seems like the problem that would be most valuable to solve. I’d like to believe that if every person in the world gets a quality education then pretty quickly humanity will have an army of engineers that can tackle every other problem, even the flying car one.
[Counterpoint: some of the most educated people I know are also some of the least empathetic and most sure of their mistakes. Maybe if the world was super educated, humanity would destroy itself over an argument about whether one is a prime number, or whether a flightless bird is really a bird. But hopefully they will solve the empathy problem too before killing each other.]
Khan Academy has taken an important step toward delivering a cheap, personalized and effective education to all. In the short term, I hope that the tools and ideas Sal developed can be incorporated into schools, not just as educational aids, but as an integral part of the educational experience. In the long term, I dream that someday we can create Neal Stephenson’s “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer,” a program runnable on cheap hardware that for each child can figure out what they know and what is the next lesson they need to learn.
When I was a kid, I loved the Inspector Gadget cartoons, most of all because one of the characters (Penny) carried around a book-sized computer capable of both communication and research. At the time, in the 80s, it seemed like a truly magical device that could only exist in a cartoon. By the time I went to college, clunky laptops were available and the internet existed, though with very limited content. You could see that these could be the eventual pieces of such a technology, but it still seemed far off. Today I have in my pocket a device that is smaller and more powerful than anything I could have dreamed of as a child. If all it had was Wikipedia, Google maps and a phone, that would have been enough (Dayenu!). But even the most basic smartphone has so many other goodies that it seems almost magical.
I think that self-paced mastery-learning tools like Khan Academy are still in the “clunky laptop and crappy internet” stage: we can see the pieces but they have not yet fully come together. At a minimum, Khan Academy might benefit from more polished videos that can hold the attention of a wider audience. Further afield, I imagine a solid feedback system that offers tips and guidance similar to what a good teacher could do. The final product may even have a strong social element that helps motivate its students. While there is still a lot of work to be done to make this a reality, I believe that within our lifetimes we may see an education revolution that is even more amazing than the smartphone revolution. The book opens by saying:
“I’m writing this book because I believe that the way we teach and learn is at a once-a-millennium turning point.”
I agree.