Book Review: The One World School House

By Salman Khan

Summarised in one quote:

Today’s world needs a workshop 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 [of education] actively suppresses. (p.80)

Sal Khan’s work is unique among the selection of books that stew on the inadequacies of modern education and pontificate on its evolution into the future, because he is a practitioner first.

I like how his points are supported by first-hand experience with real students. He never admits to having all the answers, nor disrespects the supreme value of teachers in classrooms. Instead he challenges the legacy structure of the education system in general, and explores its roots in an industrial-era world.

In The One World School House, Khan details his personal experience building an online learning platform used by millions around the world, and presents a humble opinion that hopes to contribute to the advancement in education reform.

Book Notes

Khan leans heavily on the concept of the ‘Prussian model’ of education, which he argues underpins every facet of our education system today. The Prussian model was founded in a work environment that demanded compliant, standardised factory workers who submitted to authority. Today’s society values traits in young people completely opposite to those valued 200 years ago, and Sal states that education has not kept up.

He focusses on two processes that could be implemented in today’s schooling to better meet the needs of the modern world.

Self-paced learning

Students should be fully confident in a topic before advancing further in the subject. Sal describes anything else as a ‘Swiss-cheese’ approach to learning, where students are left with holes in their knowledge that steadily accumulate until the structure can no longer support itself.

One of Khan Academy’s greatest benefits is that it allows students to go at their own pace, and only moves on to more advanced topics when they are fully adept at the current one. This frees teachers from going at a regimented pace and allows them to offer guidance where it is most needed.

Fluid, Connected Subjects

At school it can be easy to forget that subjects are inextricably intertwined in the real world. Wouldn’t it be cool to truly understand how maths links to biology, links to psychology, links to economics? By implementing such an ethos, it would encourage learning less dependent on rote memorisation and more in tune with how the world truly works.

Desegregated Students

Sal Khan hates sets — where students are split into ability. The reason is because they have a disproportionate affect on a student’s future prospects (and their internal moral), and rely only on junky measures taken early in the school year.

Khan himself has witnessed students initially learn at a slow pace only for the subject to suddenly click, and elevate to the best in the class. Not to mention, mixed ability classes allow students to help and interact with one other, rather than having to depend on the teacher to provide all the answers.

Sal even endorses mixed-aged classrooms, and early experiments in American schools show success.

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