The first time I went, I thought it was the biggest racket. Every day, starting in second grade, they took me out of class for an hour, and I would go to another room, with a mixed age group. I had this to some degree at the public school I went to in Louisiana, where there were gifted programs. Khan Academy is all about giving more breathing room.

You’re not allowed to go beyond the curriculum. How do you bring it back?Ĭuriosity is a hard thing to squash, but the traditional model of education manages pretty well: Listen to lectures, take notes, feed back what you learned, and then forget it all. In your book, you talk about curiosity being stamped out of kids. If you want to get more tangible, I would say learn how to program a computer, more about the law, and definitely statistics. So you have to say, “What information and people do I have at my disposal? What questions do I need to ask? How do I gauge whether I’ve really understood it?” Khan Academy is designed to give students that agency. Worse, it creates a mind-set of “you need to teach me,” so when you’re on your own, you think, “I can’t learn.” Anyone in any industry will tell you there’s new stuff to learn every week these days. You sit in a chair, and the teacher tries to project knowledge at you some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t. In the traditional academic model, you’re passive. The one meta-level thing is to take agency over your own learning. What are the key concepts students should understand in order to be successful in today’s workplace? Nine years later, his nonprofit organization, Khan Academy, draws on the same approach to offer more than 5,000 free, web-based video lessons to millions of students across the globe, disrupting not only schools but also the education industry built around them. Salman Khan was working as a hedge fund analyst when he started using online tools to tutor his cousins in math.

Khan salman academy