The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

  So let us imagine optimizing the model that Waterloo has already begun. Imagine a new university in Silicon Valley—it doesn’t have to be here but it will help to make things concrete. I am a big believer that inspiring physical spaces and rich community really do elevate and develop one’s thinking. So we’ll put in dormitories, nicely manicured outdoor spaces, and as many areas that facilitate interaction and collaboration as possible. Students would be encouraged to start clubs and organize intellectual events. So far, this is not so different from your typical residential college.

  What is completely different is where and how the students spend their days. Rather than taking notes in lecture halls, these students will be actively learning through real-world intellectual projects. A student could spend five months at Google optimizing a search algorithm. She might spend another six months at Microsoft working on human speech recognition. The next four months could be spent apprenticing under a designer at Apple, followed by a year of building her own mobile applications. Six months could be spent doing biomedical research at a start-up or even at another university like Stanford. Another four months could be spent prototyping and patenting an invention. Students could also apprentice with venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs, eventually leading to attempts to start their own businesses. One of the primary roles of the college itself would be to make sure that the internships are challenging and intellectual; that they truly do support a student’s development.

  All of this will be tied together with a self-paced academic scaffold through something like the Khan Academy. Students will also still be expected to have a broad background in the arts and deep proficiency in the sciences; it will just be done in a more natural way. They will be motivated to formally learn about linear algebra when working on a computer graphics apprenticeship at Pixar or Electronic Arts. They will want to learn accounting when working under the CFO of a publicly traded company. Ungraded seminars will be held regularly during nights and weekends when students can enjoy and discuss great works of literature and art. If the students decide that they want to prove their academic ability within a domain—like algorithms or French history—they can sign up for the rigorous assessments we discussed in the last chapter.

  Let me stress the notion of ungraded seminars in the arts, because I think it would lead to more appreciation of the humanities than what goes on in traditional colleges. Take a look at literature. In most colleges and high schools, students are forced to read great works—or at least those deemed great by their professors. They do this within a deadline-based setting where they have to read two hundred pages by Friday. And this is while they have a lot of other work to do from their other classes. At the end of the reading, they must participate in a discussion or take an exam or write a paper—which is graded. Given all of this artificial structure and assessment around a work of literature, do we really think the student has time to appreciate and enjoy it? Is the point here really to see who can read two hundred pages by Friday and impress a professor on an essay to get an A? Look at the graduates who used their straight A’s in comparative literature, history, or political science to get a competitive position in investment banking, law, medicine, or consulting. How much do they remember, much less read and appreciate, the classics now? Many of the ones I know haven’t read a major work of literature since college.

  I feel strongly about this because when I was in school I was not a fan of the forced reading for a paper and/or exam around an artificial timeline. It made me, and my peers, treat amazing works of art as busywork that was standing between us and our grades/diplomas/jobs. We’ve already talked about how forcing math down students’ throats according to an artificially imposed one-pace-fits-all curriculum causes them to dislike it. It is even worse in the humanities. One can appreciate and internalize neither logarithms nor Thoreau if they are force-fed at an artificial pace. This is why so many students—often boys—have something approaching post-traumatic stress disorder when someone brings up Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick. When Newton or Gauss explored mathematics that unlocked mysteries of their universe, their intent was to empower—and maybe inspire—humanity. The goals of Twain, Dickens, or Austen were similar: to deeply entertain while opening our eyes and minds. Neither the great mathematicians’ nor the great writers’ goal was to create tools of torture for high school or college students—but that is how many students have grown to view their work.

  One of my all-time favorite books is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—I know, a bit girly, but great is great. I hated the book when I was forced to read it and write a book report at fourteen. I only realized that I loved it—and a lot of literature—when I reread it for fun on a whim when I was twenty-three. The same is true for Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, and Brave New World. Not only was I more mature and had more perspective on life, but I had the time and motivation to appreciate it. I believe that motivation, the culture of a community, and outlets for exploration drive the appreciation of the arts, not grades and credit-unit requirements.

  Returning to our hypothetical apprenticeship-based college in Silicon Valley: Who will be the faculty? Why not the executives, scientists, artists, designers and engineers that the students will work with? Some of the most effective professors I have had in my education were not professional researchers; they were retired or practicing scientists, engineering, investors, or executives, all of whom wanted to teach and mentor.

  Traditional universities proudly list the Nobel laureates they have on campus (most of whom have little to no interaction with students). Our university would list the great entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives serving as student advisers and mentors. This could be supplemented with dedicated faculty with more specialized backgrounds in fields like history or law or literature or mathematics.

  What about grades and a transcript? How will employers and graduate schools know which students are strong and which are weak? As already touched on, many of the employers will have had direct interaction with these students through their apprenticeships, giving them a much deeper view into a student’s abilities, work ethic, and personality. Even employers—or graduate schools—who have not had direct interaction with the student can see the student’s portfolio of work, and also, if the student allows, can have access to letters of assessment and recommendation from people the student has worked with. This is essentially how any job applicant is treated five years after graduation today—grades and majors take a backseat to what the individual has actually done in the real world. Additionally, students will be free to take the aforementioned rigorous assessments to show that they can go deep in certain academic areas.

  Will the traditional GPA be missed as a measure of ability? I don’t think so. Consider that the average graduating GPA at many elite universities is around a 3.5.3 Couple that with the fact that 95 to 97 percent of students graduate and you may conclude that the most difficult part of getting a degree with a decent GPA from some universities is getting through their hyperintense admissions process when you are seventeen. The rest gets pretty fuzzy.

  I am by no means the first person to rethink what college could be. PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has been a vocal critic of what he calls a “college bubble” and has funded the Thiel Fellowship program to pop it. Thiel Fellows, as they are called, are twenty high-caliber students who are each given $100,000 to drop out of college and work on an ambitious idea or project. According to the program’s website, the fellows will be “mentored by our network of visionary thinkers, investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs, who provide guidance and business connections that can’t be replicated in any classroom.” What I love about this is that it is mixing things up and making people realize that the traditional way isn’t necessarily the best way for everyone.

  The difference between the Thiel Fellowship and what I am advocating is that I do not want to throw out the idea of college entirely. I think the shared experience of being on a campus and exp
loring alongside other motivated and inquisitive individuals is a powerful one. It is also clear that for most students a college degree is a form of risk mitigation, something that’s there to fall back on. Many of the Thiel Fellows may not succeed on their first big venture. The prestige of having been a Thiel Fellow may open future doors, but this cannot be guaranteed. Still, allowing for some differences, the Thiel program and my own vision are aligned in spirit. Grow Thiel’s fellowship to several hundred students a year; allow them to be mentored in various settings, not just one where they are starting a venture; house the students in an inspiring residential campus; and give them a scaffold of academics, and we are talking about almost the same thing.

  We started this thought experiment by envisioning a school focused on engineering, design, and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. We placed it there so that it could take advantage of the local ecosystem. Why not a school of finance or journalism located in New York or London, or a school focused on energy in Houston? Even better, why can’t they all be affiliated so that a student can experience multiple cities and industries, all while having a residential and intellectual support network?

  Will this be for everyone? Absolutely not. But majoring in literature or accounting at a traditional university isn’t for everyone either. There should be more options, and this could be one of them—an option that introduces diversity of thought and practice into a higher education world that has not changed dramatically in hundreds of years.

  It also should be noted that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a new university. Existing campuses could move in this direction by deemphasizing or eliminating lecture-based courses, having their students more engaged in research and co-ops in the broader world, and having more faculty with broad backgrounds who show a deep desire to mentor students.

  Conclusion

  Making Time for Creativity

  Here is one of the most ancient questions in the history of education: Can creativity be taught?

  No one yet has come up with a definitive answer to that riddle, and I certainly don’t presume to offer one here. But I will say this: Whether or not creativity, still less genius, can be taught, it can certainly be squelched. And our current factory model of education seems perversely designed to do exactly that.

  Nearly everything about our current system rewards passivity and conformity and discourages differentness and fresh thinking. For most of the conventional school day, kids just sit while teachers talk. Cloistered away with students their own age, they are deprived of the varying and often mind-stretching perspectives of kids both more and less advanced. They move in lockstep through rigid, balkanized curricula aimed less at deep learning than at the fulfillment of government mandates and creditable performance on standardized tests.

  If this lockstep education inculcates a chilling fear of falling behind, an even more insidious outcome is that it also undermines the whole idea of moving ahead. Why learn what you won’t be tested on? Why go where the overworked and stressed-out teacher won’t have the time or energy to follow? Thus initiative is frowned upon, making it clear that conventional education—whatever the political slogans happen to say—is not about excellence; it’s about minimizing risk, eliminating downside surprises. Inevitably, however, the upside is muted as well. In this straitjacket of a system, the successful student—the student who gets A’s—is the one who does the expected thing, who plows dutifully ahead on the path of least resistance. Does it take a measure of intelligence and discipline to succeed along this narrow path? Yes, of course it does. Does it call for any sort of originality or specialness? Probably not.

  Even our usual extracurricular activities tend to encourage an orderly plodding along predictable paths. In the name of making kids well rounded—which of course is code for attractive to admissions officers—we present them with a menu that is illusory in its actual range of options. It’s a bit like the 500-channel TV scenario; how much is real choice and how much is just clutter? In the standard view, everyone should play a sport. Everyone should have something brainy, like chess club or debating team, on his or her transcript. And let’s not forget the artsy side of life. Drama club? Marching band?

  To be clear, I am not trying to denigrate the intrinsic value of any of these pastimes; if a kid feels a true calling toward chess or trumpet playing or set design, I think that’s great. What I’m criticizing is an educational approach that, because of its built-in inefficiencies and obsession with control, keeps kids so busy, often with activities that have nothing to do with their particular talents or interests, that they have no time to think. There’s a cruel irony in this. Pressured to keep a full plate of purportedly enriching activities, kids end up barely noticing that their interior lives—their uniqueness, curiosity, and creativity—are in fact becoming impoverished.

  To hit the point home, in 2001 the dean of admissions at an elite university asked a group of students, “What do you daydream about?” One kid told her, “We don’t daydream. There’s no reward for it, so we don’t do it.”4

  In this connection, let’s consider the Plato quote that serves as an epigraph for this book:

  The elements of instruction… should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.

  Discovering—and nurturing—the natural bent of the child; isn’t this the proper goal of education? And what exactly is meant by this vague phrase “natural bent”? To me, it refers to the particular mix of talents and perspectives that makes each mind unique, and that allows for some minds to be strikingly original. This originality is related to intelligence, but not identical to it. It correlates with differentness and not infrequently with strangeness. Originality is stubborn but not indestructible. You can’t tell it what to do, and if you try too hard to steer it, you either chase it away or murder it.

  But can you teach it? Frankly, I doubt this. Yet at the same time I am entirely confident that more creativity would emerge from my imagined school of the very near future. My reasons for believing this are not at all mysterious. More creativity would emerge because it would be allowed to emerge and because there would be time for this to happen.

  Let’s think a moment about this deceptively simple issue of time. The conventional school day burns up roughly half of students’ waking hours; conventional homework commandeers another significant chunk. During all this time, kids’ concentration and effort are directed toward achieving entirely predictable results. They’re working the same problems as everybody else, trying to get to the same and only right answer. They’re all writing basically the same essay, memorizing the same names and dates. In other words, they are spending more than half their waking hours being the opposite of creative.

  As I hope is clear by now, I’m a big believer that almost anyone can obtain an intuitive understanding of almost any concept if he or she approaches it with a deep understanding of the fundamentals. Students need a firm foundation before anything of consequence can be accomplished. But the simple truth is that building this foundation doesn’t need to eat up half their lives. Using self-paced video lessons, in combination with the computer-based feedback and team-teaching help already described, fundamental coursework can be handled in one or two hours a day. That frees up five or six or seven hours for creative pursuits, both individual and collaborative. That might mean writing poems or computer code, making films or building robots, working with paint or in some weird little corner of physics or math—it being remembered that original math or science or engineering is neither more nor less than art by another name.

  If the sheer grinding length of the conventional school day is a brake on creativity, so is the artificial chopping up of time into lessons. Time, after all, is a continuum; like thought itself, it flows. The end of a series of lessons blocks the
flow, puts a brick wall in the way. It tells students where they need to stop learning. This is bad enough in cases where a student, say, might like to look a bit more deeply into the causes of the French Revolution; where it’s really deadly, however, is in cases where a student is off on a daring and creative tangent, wrestling with a major project or an idea that is truly novel. That kind of creative work simply can’t be put on a deadline; genius doesn’t punch a time clock! Can you imagine if someone told Einstein, Okay, wrap up this relativity thing, we’re moving on to European history? Or said to Michelangelo, Time’s up for the ceiling, now go paint the walls. Yet versions of this snuffing out of creativity and boundary-stretching thought happen all the time in conventional schools.

  The schoolhouse I envision would be very different in this regard. Because I would stress the connections and the continuity among concepts, there would be no brick walls between one “subject” and the next. Since learning would be self-paced and self-motivated, there would be no ticking clock telling students when they had to drop a particular line of inquiry. And since the higher goal of our school would be deep, conceptual understanding rather than mere test prep, students would be given the time and latitude to follow their curiosity as far as it would carry them. Thus my belief that creativity would emerge because it would be allowed to emerge.

  But there’s a corollary to this that makes a lot of people nervous. If you allow and encourage true creativity, you also have to accept the possibility of failure. A student might pursue an esoteric math topic for a year and never find an answer. A fresh approach to an engineering problem might obsess a student for many months then turn out not to work. A student playwright might never figure out his final act, student poetry might turn out just plain bad. My response to these failures: So what? Think what was learned along the way. Honor the effort and the courage that went into these ambitious and often solitary undertakings. Think about the grand results that might have happened—that can only happen when people pursue big ideas and take big risks. Going back to the very beginning of this book, one of the many things that has made America the most fertile soil for innovation is that it does not stigmatize risk and failure anywhere near as much as the rest of the world. Our schools should be the same—environments for safe experimentation, viewing failure as an opportunity for learning rather than a mark of shame.