The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

  As a classical legacy, this perceived separation between the truly intellectual and the merely useful was perpetuated by the European universities during the Renaissance, then passed along to the early American colleges. The same set of biases persisted more or less intact well into the nineteenth century. Throughout this period, universities were generally something of an intellectual retreat for those who did not need to work in the traditional sense—future clergy, sons of the wealthy, and those devoting their lives to arts and letters (often enabled by the patronage of a wealthy family). Careers in even very intellectual professions, like law and medicine, were primarily developed outside the universities, through apprenticeships (although a few degree programs did begin to emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). 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.

  Let me be clear as to why I raise this point. I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t go to college. My contention, rather, is that universities and their career-seeking students have a deep-seated contradiction to resolve: On the one hand, our society now views a college education as a gateway to employment; on the other hand, academia has tended to maintain a bias against the vocational.

  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.

  But let’s get back to some history.

  In terms of making knowledge available to the many, the most important technology since spoken language has been written text. It has allowed for knowledge to exist and be collected outside a human mind. This allowed for information to persist unchanged over generations and for large amounts of information to be standardized and distributed (without the distributor having to memorize it).

  Writing was a huge step forward, but it did come with unintended consequences. Whenever there is a hugely empowering new technology it can increase inequity between the haves that have access to it and the have-nots that don’t. Early writings—whether it was on papyrus scrolls in ancient Egypt or in parchment books of the early Catholic Church—were nice for those who had access to them and knew how to read, but most people didn’t. So the availability of written sources, far from eliminating the elitism and class distinctions that had gone before, actually exacerbated them for a time. The privileged now had greater supplies of special knowledge and therefore greater power.

  And to make it clear how privileged a thing books were in their early days, think about how they had to be produced. They would be hand-copied by very specialized people with good penmanship. Consider how much it would cost to have one of the most educated people in your town spend a few years copying, say, the Bible, and you’ll have a good sense of how expensive early books were—something on the order of a decent house in today’s terms. So you can imagine that few people had access to touch them, much less the ability to read them.

  Then came primitive block printing. Now a skilled artisan could carve text and images on the surface of a wooden block, dip it in ink, and press it onto a piece of paper. This was an advancement, but books were still expensive. Depending on the number of prints, this could actually be more labor-intensive than hand-copying text. It is hard to inflation-adjust the price of something over seven or eight centuries, but roughly based on the amount of labor involved, single books would have been comparable in cost to a nice luxury car—so well-off families might have a few, but they were by no means commonplace.

  Then something epic happened in 1450 in Strasbourg, a German-speaking town that is now part of France. A fifty-two-year-old blacksmith named Johannes Gutenberg decided that he could simplify the creation of the blocks for printing text. Instead of each block being separately hand-carved, he realized that the individual letter blocks or “type” could be made in metal once and put together on a block for a given page. They could then be rearranged for the next page. Instead of multiple weeks of a skilled artisan’s time being required to make a block for one page, it could now be done by a typesetter moving around type in a matter of a few hours—reducing labor costs by a factor of from ten to one hundred. Also, because the type was reused, more effort could be put into making the letters precise and uniform (thus the emergence of fonts). Because they were metal, instead of wood, they were more durable and the printing presses could be run faster. Now great works of writing would be accessible to many, many more people (although the first and only major work that Gutenberg printed at scale—the Gutenberg Bible—was still quite expensive for the time). Even more, it now became practical to print and distribute writings that weren’t holy books or great works of classical literature—it is no coincidence that the first modern newspaper emerged in Gutenberg’s Strasbourg roughly 150 years after the printing press.

  In the spirit of not being Eurocentric, credit for the first movable type has to be given to the Chinese, who invented it a few hundred years before Gutenberg. He, however, was the first to create his type pieces out of materials similar to those used today. It also appears that movable type was able to spark more of a revolution in fifteenth-century Europe than in eleventh-century China and thirteenth-century Korea.

  By the eighteenth century, movable type and the printing press had been perfected to the point that books were reasonably affordable. By the nineteenth century, what we now call textbooks had become viewed as a mainstay of mainstream education.

  Pedagogically as well as politically, the broad distribution of textbooks raised new questions and difficulties—questions and difficulties that remain at the forefront of educational arguments today.

  Before books were widely distributed, teaching was incredibly nonuniform. Teachers taught what they knew, in the manner that seemed best to them. Each teacher was therefore different, and when a teacher acquired a reputation for wisdom or originality or thrilling oratory—not necessarily accurate information—pupils flocked to him. Like a beloved village rabbi or priest, he was deemed to have something that could be gotten nowhere else. His students, in turn, came away with an education—and sometimes misinformation—unique to that particular classroom.

  The mass production of books changed all that—and this is an aspect of education history to which too little attention has been paid. No longer was the teacher the sole source of information and the ultimate authority on a subject. Now there was an expert behind the expert, sharing in the teacher’s prestige as the source of knowledge. The teacher ruled in the classroom but the textbook had standing in the world beyond. What if the teacher and the text disagreed? The legitimizing power of print seemed to give the last word to the book. On the other hand, textbooks empowered teachers to expose their students to the latest thinking from the broader world. They gave students the ability to study at their own pace and come to class ready to be engaged at a deeper level by a master teacher.

  What is clear, however, is that it was the wide availability of books that ushered in the age of educational standardization. Suddenly students in distant places were reading the same poems and proverbs, learning the same historic dates and names of kings and generals, working out the same problems in arithmetic.

  And standardization itself was not a bad thing. In a world growing more complex and gradually interconnected, standardization was a means to inclusion; it promised a leveling of the playing field and at least the potential for a true meritocracy. It also mitigated the impact of bad instruction that would otherwise go unchecked. Now students were less likely to be misled by a one-off viewpoint or inaccurate exp
lanation.

  The challenge, however—the same challenge in the early days of textbooks as now in the wider world of Internet-based learning—was this: How can we most effectively deploy standardized learning tools without undermining the unique gifts of teachers?

  The Prussian Model

  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

  As we’ve seen, education through the ages took place in many different venues and by many different methods. Apprentices learned by doing in their masters’ workshops. Classical Greeks walked around or sat under olive trees, exchanging viewpoints until the wine ran out. Early universities pursued esoteric topics for a handful of privileged people who’d done their early learning at home; most of those students were wealthy or connected enough that “work” was almost a dirty word.

  That gives us a little context for higher education. But when and where did there come to be such a thing as “primary school” and “secondary school” as we know it (or K-12 education, as it is often now referred to)? The orthodoxies that we take for granted and are now in thrall to—the length of the school day and the school year; the division of the day into periods; the slicing of disciplines into “subjects”—where did these things come from? For that matter, who decided that education should be tax-supported and compulsory, that it should begin at a certain age and end after a certain number of “grades,” and that it should be the business of the state to decide what should be taught and who could be a teacher?

  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.”

  The standard classroom model offered boundless opportunities for political indoctrination. Some of these were direct and obvious, such as the manner in which subjects like history and social studies were presented. But there were also other, more subtle ways of shaping young minds. Former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto has written that “the whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates.” 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.

  Similarly, according to Gatto, our sacred notion of the “class period” was put in place “so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.” Heaven forbid that students might delve beyond the prescribed curriculum or have time to discuss possibly heterodox and dangerous ideas among themselves; the bell rang and they had no choice but to break off their conversation or their deeper inquiry and move on to the next episode of approved instruction. By design, order trumped curiosity; regimentation took precedence over personal initiative.

  Now, I don’t personally believe that the Prussian system was designed purely as a tool for subjugation to the will of a ruling class. There were many aspects of it that were innovative and egalitarian for the time. In fact, just the notion of a universal, tax-funded, mandatory public education system was revolutionary. It lifted millions into the middle class and played no small part in Germany’s rise as an industrial power. And the most economical way to deliver education to everyone, given the technology at the time, may have been the Prussian model. However, whether it was intentional or not, the system tended to stifle deeper inquiry and independent thought. In the 1800s, high-level creative and logical thinking may not have been as important as a disciplined tractability coupled with basic skills, but two hundred years later, they clearly are.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Prussian system was put in place in the United States with few modifications, largely due to the influence of Horace Mann, then the Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts. 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.

  By 1870, all thirty-seven states had public schools and the United States had become one of the most literate countries in the world.3 Although the most fundamental ideas of the Prussian model—students separated by age moving in lockstep, bells ringing—had become commonplace, there was not yet a lot of standardization across the country as to what the students were taught and for how many years they needed to be educated.

  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. For example, regarding geometry:

  As soon as the student has acquired the art of rigorous demonstration, his work should cease to be merely receptive. He should begin to devise constructions and demonstrations for himself. Geometry cannot be mastered by reading the demonstrations of a text-book, and while there is no branch of elementary mathematics in which purely receptive work, if continued too long, may lose its interest more completely, there is also none in which independent work can be made more attractive and stimulating.

  In other words, if you want students to really learn geometry, you can’t just have them listen, read, and repeat. You have to allow students to explore the subject on their own.

  For all their comparative enlightenment, however, the Committee of Ten lived in a world without interstate highways, the Federal Reserve, television, awareness of DNA, or air travel except in balloons, not to mention computers and the Internet. The system they framed has not been fundamentally r
ethought in 120 years, and it has by now taken on such a weight of orthodoxy and rust as to stifle the sincere creative efforts of even the best-meaning teachers and administrators.

  The heavy baggage of the current academic model has become increasingly apparent recently, as economic realities no longer favor a docile and disciplined working class with just the basic proficiencies in reading, math, and the liberal arts. Today’s world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses.

  Arguments about education are contentious enough without bringing partisan politics into them, but it is interesting to note in passing that in recent years our Prussian-based public school model has come under virulent attack from both the right and the left. Conservative complaints tend to center on the alleged usurpation by government of choices and prerogatives more properly left to parents; as it was put by author Sheldon Richman in his book Separating School and State: How to Liberate American Families, “the state’s apparently benevolent goal of universal education has actually been an insidious effort to capture all children in its net.”

  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.”4