The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

  For the above reasons, I believe that the school of the future should be built around an updated version of the one-room schoolhouse. Kids of different ages should mix. Without the tyranny of the broadcast lecture and the one-size-fits-all curriculum, there is no reason this can’t be done. With self-paced learning established as the basic model, there’s no reason to lump kids by age, still less to “track” them based on perceived potential. The older or more advanced students become allies of the teacher by mentoring and tutoring the kids who are behind. Younger students benefit by having a range of role models, big brothers and big sisters. Older kids sharpen and refine their understanding of concepts in the act of explaining them to younger kids. No one is just a student; everyone is a teacher as well, worthy of the respect that goes with that. And the schoolroom, rather than being an artificial cloister shut off from the rest of life, comes to more closely resemble the world beyond its walls—and therefore to better prepare students to function and to flourish in that world.

  This idea of the age-mixed classroom is not some unrealistic fantasy. It is already being experimented with in one of the best schools in the country—Marlborough School, an all-girls prep school in Los Angeles. Last year, I was introduced to one of their students, India Yaffe, who had won an essay-writing competition called the Guerin Prize, in which the students write about someone they would like to meet. In what I can only consider bad judgment on the part of a teenager, she wanted to meet me.

  So India, her dad, and the head of the school’s math department, Dr. Chris Talone, came to visit. Beyond just chatting about education and math in general, Dr. Talone expressed interest in working with the Khan Academy in some way. I said I’d be game if they were willing to push the envelope—namely, use Khan Academy to facilitate a math class that didn’t separate students by age. They agreed that it was an approach worth trying. So we designed an inclusive class, using Khan Academy video lessons and feedback software, to be taught by Dr. Talone for students representing every level of math from pre-algebra to AP calculus. The ground rules stipulated that the course material be at least as rigorous as the instruction in the regular and honors-level math classes at Marlborough, and that students at every grade level would in fact come away fully prepared for their next level in the math sequence.

  At the time of this writing, the class is in its sixth month and all the evidence we’ve seen and heard suggests that it is magical. Seventh graders are working alongside girls all the way up to twelfth grade. They are all working on what they need to work on. They have access to their peers and an amazing teacher when they need it. The girls are learning more and are less stressed. I’ve been told that the biggest problem has been resentment from girls who weren’t able to get in on the experiment.

  Teaching as a Team Sport

  Conventional classroom teaching is one of the loneliest jobs in the world. Surrounded by a sea of kids, the teacher is like a lone rock in a bay. Sure, there’s the faculty lounge where one can have a cup of coffee, a brief chat, maybe even sneak a cigarette… but when a teacher is actually doing his work, he’s out there all alone. There’s no peer support, no one to consult with, no one to ask for help or confirmation. There’s no buddy in the next cubicle with whom to shed some tension, no extra set of eyes to deal with the dizzying peripheral business of a real live classroom.

  This should change so that teachers can have some of the practical and emotional benefits that pertain in nearly every other profession—the chance to help each other, lean on each other when necessary, to mentor and be mentored by colleagues.

  As a corollary of having mixed-age classes, I would also propose maintaining student/teacher ratios, but merging classrooms together. Now that students can all learn at their own pace, we no longer need the artificial separation of classrooms that are designed for students to listen to a lecture from one teacher. To be clear, I’m not suggesting either a net loss or a net gain of teaching positions. But rather than three or four separate classes of twenty-five kids and one lonesome teacher, I would suggest a class of seventy-five to a hundred students with three or four teachers. To me there are several clear advantages to this, all of which stem from the enhancement of flexibility in a system such as this.

  In a one-teacher classroom, what you get is… one teacher. There are only so many techniques that a single teacher can deploy. In a class with multiple teachers, the permutations expand exponentially (actually factorially, but you get the picture). Where appropriate, teachers can teach in tandem—taking different sides, say, in a debate, or working with different small teams on project-building. In other instances, a particular teacher might have special expertise on a topic, and would handle that piece on her own. Or again, since everyone needs downtime, team teachers could easily rotate in and out, thereby avoiding the disruption and inefficiency that usually accompanies the appearance of the dreaded “substitute.”

  Most basically, since teaching is a complex and multifaceted job, and since no two people have the exact same set of strengths and weaknesses, a multiple-teacher arrangement would give each teacher the chance to focus on what he or she does best. Further, since there’s no such thing as a single right way to teach or a single right way to approach a subject, students would have the benefit of being exposed to a number of different, nuanced perspectives; this would help them to become critical thinkers, and provide better preparation for dealing with a world of widely divergent viewpoints and opinions.

  In emotional as well as pedagogic ways, a multiteacher classroom makes sense. Given the mysteries of human personality, certain kids and certain teachers will always discover affinities that become the basis for important bonds; having several teachers in a classroom allows more opportunities for this magic to occur.

  Finally, I believe a multiple-teacher system would go a long way toward solving the very serious problem of teacher burnout. Giving teachers more professional companionship and real-time peer support would make their work less stressful. As in almost every other field, teachers would now be able to observe and mentor each other. Younger teachers would learn from more experienced ones. Older teachers would absorb energy and fresh ideas from newer ones. Everyone would benefit from being less isolated.

  Speaking of teamwork, have you ever noticed that some kids tend to loathe and detest their teachers but worship and adore their coaches?

  On the face of it, this is absurd. Both teachers and coaches are there to help. Both ask students to push themselves to do difficult things—not infrequently, things that kids claim they really hate to do, such as deriving equations or running wind sprints. Yet students’ stance vis-à-vis their teachers is often adversarial, while their attitude toward coaches tends to be enthusiastic and cooperative. Why the dramatic difference?

  Part of it, of course, is simply that teachers represent what students have to do, while coaches represent what they’ve chosen to do. But I would argue that this alone does not explain the dichotomy. I believe that a big part of the reason kids revere and obey their coaches is that the coaches are specifically and explicitly on the student’s side. Coaches are helping them be the best they can be, so that they can experience the thrill of winning. In team sports, coaches inculcate the atavistic spirit and focus of a hunting clan. In individual sports, the coach stands tall as the main if not the only ally. When kids win, coaches celebrate along with them; when they lose, the coach is there to comfort and to find a lesson in defeat.

  By contrast, from the perspective of many students, teachers are not viewed as someone who is on their side. They are not viewed as someone preparing them for competition with an adversary. Unfortunately, they are often seen as the adversary themselves—someone who throws busywork and disjointed formulas at them in order to make sure they have no free time and humiliate them. Is this viewpoint fair? Of course not. Most teachers care at least as much about their students as a coach does. So why does it happen?

  It happens because teachers are forced to drag students along a
t a set pace in a system where assessments are used to label people rather than to help them master concepts that will be relevant in succeeding in a very competitive world. Let’s face it—teachers no less than coaches are preparing kids for a world of competition, but that message is seldom made explicit.

  In fact, the only way to do it would be to make clear that what happens in the classroom is but preparation for real competition in the outside world. That the exams aren’t there to label and humiliate you; they are there to fine-tune your abilities. That when you have identified deficiencies, it doesn’t mean that you are dumb; it means that you have something to work on. The teacher will make it their priority to make sure you repair those weak points and not artificially push you to the next topic on which you will have even more difficulty. The teacher, like a coach, needs to emphasize that anything less than mastery won’t do because he or she expects you to be the best thinker and creator that you can be.

  Ordered Chaos Is a Good Thing

  Picture the stereotype of a perfectly run conventional classroom. Desks are arranged in tidy ranks and rows as on a chessboard. Students deploy their notebooks at parallel slants, their pencils poised in unison, like the bows of a violin section. All eyes are on the teacher looming at the front of the room. Silence reigns but for the first tap of her chalk against the blackboard. It’s a decorous and fitting atmosphere… for a funeral.

  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. Let me pause a moment to stress this: one-fifth of the students. This is another way of saying that only one-fifth of the school day, or one to two hours, would be spent on the Khan Academy lessons (or some future version thereof) and any peer tutoring that it might catalyze. Given the greatly increased efficiency of self-paced, mastery-based learning, one or two hours 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. That’s neither true nor necessary. An hour or two suffices—and, as we’ve already discussed, even that time involves significant peer-to-peer tutoring and one-on-one time with teachers.

  But let’s come back to the rest of the students. Twenty kids out of a hundred are working at computers, 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. In today’s schools, it’s not hard to find “different-thinking” students who are too often neglected, misunderstood, and either alienated or simply left behind by rigid standard curricula. I’m talking about the kind of kid who might prove to be brilliant but at certain snapshot moments is regarded as slow, or the kind of kid whose interests zig off in peculiar directions that the rest of the class simply doesn’t have time or interest to follow. The kid who becomes obsessed with solid geometry and isn’t ready to let it go when the lesson ends, but rather wants to derive its equations and spin out its implications all on his own. Or the kid who is happiest racking her brain over a math problem that might not even have a solution. Or formulating an approach in engineering that has never even been tried.

  These are the kinds of curious, mysterious, and original minds that often end up making major contributions to our world; to reach their full potential, however, they need the latitude to follow their own oblique, nonstandard paths. That latitude is seldom found in a conventional, box-shaped classroom in which everyone is supposed to be doing the exact same lesson, and “differentness” is generally used as a negative. To a large degree, these students just haven’t allowed themselves to be molded to the Prussian ideal. And I believe many, many more students can be like them if we allow them to. I believe a school in which they could cover basic course material in one or two hours a day, leaving plenty of time—not interrupted by bells every hour—and space for their private mulling in a supportive environment, would allow most kids to thrive academically, creatively, and emotionally. The actual physical layout of the room could be experimented with; in theory this could even occur in existing classrooms or an open field. The important difference between what I am describing and today’s classrooms is that any walls would be only superficial physical boundaries, not mental ones.

  Redefining Summer

  I realize that this next suggestion won’t win me any popularity contests, but I stand by it anyway: If we are to bring education into the twentieth century—still less the twenty-first!—we need to radically rethink the whole idea of summer vacation.

  Of all the outmoded ideas and customs that have made contemporary education inefficient and inappropriate to our needs, summer vacation is among the most egregious. It’s a carryover from a world that no longer exists, an agrarian relic on a citified globe. It made sense in, say, 1730, when most people lived on farms. Families needed to eat before they could worry about their children getting educated; kids of all ages and both genders were expected to help in the fields. That was then. Has anyone in the education establishment noticed that, at least in the industrialized nations, the world hasn’t really looked that way for the last century or two?

  As currently conceived, summer vacation is a monumental waste of time and money. Around the world, tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in education infrastructure—school buildings, labs, gymnasiums—sits vacant or at the very least seriously underutilized. Teachers don’t teach and administrators don’t administer. Worst of all, of course, is that students don’t learn. It would be bad enough if summer vacation constituted simply a pause in learning; even that would be a negative, as continuity would be broken and momentum would be lost. As everyone knows, it’s easier to keep pedaling a bicycle than to start one again after a stop; why should the process be any different with learning?

  In point of fact, however, the most serious downside of summer vacation isn’t just that kids stop learning; it’s that they almost immediately start unlearning. As we saw in our brief discussion of neuroscience, what we call “learning” has a physical correlative in the synthesis of new proteins and the construction of new neural pathways in the brain. Those pathways are strengthened by repetition and also by association. They are weakened by disuse, and if the disuse continues, the circuits eventually break down; what we call “unlearning” is the atrophy of neural pathways we used to have. Give a kid ten weeks off from school, and it’s neither metaphor nor exaggeration to say that some of what he used to know about algebra has vanished from his brain and been reabsorbed into his bloodstream, where it does him no good at all for solving quadratic equations or mastering later concepts.

  Before being branded a complete antivacation ogre, let me make cle
ar that I am not blind to the beauty of summer or the value of time away from the school routine. There are many kinds of learning and enrichment that can flourish when school is not in session. Wealthy families have the luxury of traveling with their children, broadening their horizons and showing them a wider world. Some fortunate kids get to go to high-priced summer camps where a degree of learning can happen in a context of relaxation and fun. And kids of all economic strata can pursue the sort of eccentric and self-determined projects for which there simply isn’t time during the traditional academic year, but which often turn out to be nourishing and memorable.

  I myself remember fondly a summer spent scavenging spare bicycle parts, which a friend and I then cobbled together into what we called Frankenbikes. Our plan was to sell them, but there were no takers for our bizarre creations. Still, I got pretty handy with a wrench and also learned a valuable lesson: I’d think long and hard before ever again working on a product for which there was no conceivable demand.