Is Khan Academy The Remedy For Public Education Failure Factories?
OCT 1, 2015
Sal Khan, founder of the eponymous Khan Academy, treads a fine line in his mission to remake the sclerotic world of K-12 education. With nearly a billion views of his self-paced instructional videos and supporting material, he is arguably the most impactful teacher in the history of the human race. Yet this self effacing “Math Moses” has to watch his step as he bumps up against America’s government education bureaucracy.
On the one hand, Khan’s free, self-paced, video-centric pedagogy is winning over tens of millions of students around the world, with American users highly concentrated amongst home schoolers. The results speak for themselves.
On the other hand, he has bent over backwards to position himself as a friend of the traditional public school classroom teacher, wary of generating a backlash from teachers unions suspicious of any changes that might dilute their stranglehold on public education.
Kahn’s book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, probably won’t set off fireworks in your head. But it is bound to turn on some lights. As Khan, demonstrates, education ain’t what it used to be. And what we think we know, ain’t necessarily so.
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Bill Frezza 
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