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Nina: Hi, Sal.
So, tell us a little bit about your book
and the journey that you underwent
before you started the Khan Academy,
which led you to writing this book.
Sal:Yeah, well, the book is ...
Well, it's a little bit about that journey
but really how that journey informed what Khan Academy has now become
and then, how that could inform what maybe
classrooms could become or what learning could become
and not in just a kind of
pie in the sky kind of way
but I know, this is really happening
and it really feels like we're at this inflection point
in what's going on in classrooms,.
This whole
adventure for me started somewhat,
actually, very inadvertently (chuckles),
it was 2004, I was working as an analyst at a hedge fund at the time.
I've just gotten married.
Family from New Orleans is visiting me in Boston after my wedding
and it turned out, this one cousin Nadia was having trouble,
12-years-old, I had trouble believing that.
She's an extremely bright girl.
Nina: (laughs)
And when I asked her about,
actually, her mom who told me and I asked Nadia about it
and she said, "Oh, yeah. I'm having trouble with units."
and I said,
"Let me tutor you."
I think she thought I was just bluffing.
So, I said, "No, we're gonna work this out."
She went back to New Orleans.
Got her on the phone.
We ended up using some tools on the internet
so that we could see each other scroll initially
with a mouse and we got these little pen tablet things
and
long story short, she went from being a struggling student
to catching up with her class and then becoming somewhat advanced
Nina: (laughs)
I called her school and I said, "I really think Nadia needs
"to retake a placement exam." and they said, "Who are you?"
Nina: (laughs)
but you know, I then started tutoring her brothers
and fast forward, two years, we got around, free tutoring was happening.
I was tutoring 10, 15 family, friends, cousins
and it was at that point that a
and the firm, I was working for,
it was a firm but it was my boss and his dog and me.
We moved to Silicon Valley and I was telling a friend
about all the stuff I was doing with my cousins
and he said well, and I was complaining that it's getting hard to scale.
I still had a day job.
There's all these students around the country with time zones
and etc., etc. and he said, "Why don't you make
"some tutorials to come up on YouTube?"
and I thought that was a silly idea.
Nina: (chuckles)
but I gave it a shot and long story short,
that kind of started getting a ton of traction.
People started looking at it.
[unintelligible] I was also was working on this little
software tool for my cousins.
So there's this view that, "Hey, maybe this could be
"an institution to help people." and so, we set it up,
as a not-for-profit and then in 2009, I had trouble focusing on my day job.
So, I quit and started doing Khan Academy full time.
Nina: Also, tell me a little bit about the Khan Academy.
What is the business model?
Let's start with the big, hairy audacious goal,
Sal: (laughs)
and then the business model that you've based it on.
Sal: Yeah, so the ...
Well, maybe I'll go the other way around
because you know
when I was starting all of these and I was sitting in the middle of Silicon Valley.
I came from a very for-profit-reality.
There are my friends who are venture capitalists says,
"Hey, Sal. You know we could fund this
"and it could be this double bottom line business."
or whatever that means and there was a lot of temptation there
and there's nothing wrong with that
but there was this feeling.
You know, I was getting all of these emotional reward
from these thank-you letters that people were sending me
and the sense that, "Hey, I was making these simple things
"for my cousin and now you know."
At first tens of thousands, hundreds thousands
and now, million of students are using it around the world.
I'd like this stuff to be around in 100 years or in 500 years.
I don't want this collection of software and content
and this organization.
I don't want it to skew from this mission of being able
to reach these people and so, when I look at other organizations
in the universe that are able to do that last many, many,
hopefully, centuries and stay true to their missions,
it's a not-for-profit where there is no ownership.
It's a public charity and so I said, "Well, I should set
"this up as a not for profit."
Not quite understanding what that is
and I remember when I was doing that initial paperwork for it,
the IRS asks you, "What's your mission?"
and I kind of thought about it for maybe three or four minutes
and I said, "Oh, a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere."
Nina: Why not? (laughs)
Well, you never want something you could just check, it's done.
It's an aspiration.
And it was a very delusional aspirational at the time
when I was literally operating out of the closet
but yeah, and so the business model is we're not a business,
we're a 501C3 not for profit but we still have to sustain ourselves
and the way we want to because we always want the learning side of education
We always want that to be free because we think
that's what empowers people.
It's primarily foundation and philanthropist-driven so far
but we do think there are ways to sustain itself in other ways
whether it's licensing content or who knows what?
We're trying to explore that but we're pretty true
to keeping the content free.
Nina: Sure.
How many students are you serving right now?
How many instructors?
Can you give me a sense as to how large?
Sal: Yeah, and so-
Nina: And what's the typical profile of someone who comes to your website?
Sal: Yeah.
So, the organization itself are 36 people.
We're still relatively small but it feels huge for me
because last year, we were 13 and a year before that, we were one.
(laughs) We've been growing fast but in this past month,
we've reached 7 million students, unique students.
We've reached a total of 16 million unique.
That's the way you measure unique students on the web,
delivered 180 million lessons, 700 million problems had been done on the site
and it's students all over the world.
It's pretty much every country in the world.
Someone has used the Khan Academy in some way.
20,000 teachers, as far as we can tell from our data are using it
in their classes or with their cohorts in some type of ways.
It's kind of crazy, I call it,
it's surreal for where it came from.
Nina: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about
how a classroom or a school can use you
with this concept of a flipped classroom.
Explain that to our viewers.
Sal: Yeah, and I'll do two things because
as flipped classroom has somewhat been tied to Khan Academy
and it is an interesting idea and it is I think a forward step
but part of the whole point of this whole book was
to tell people that we're not necessarily about this flip.
We're actually about pushing the envelope even further than the flip.
In a flip model, right now, at home you do problems traditionally.
That's called homework and then the classroom.
A lot of time in a traditional classroom,
we spent lectures and the flip is in a [pre-date]
Khan Academy early on at these videos out there.
Some teachers were telling me, "Hey, you made a decent video
"on meiosis or on you know, projectile motion.
"I don't have to give that lecture anymore.
"My students have been watching it on their time and pace.
"They can remediate without taking up class time
"and then when they go to class,
" that's when they can either ask me questions, clarifications
"and we can do problems together."
So, what used to be homework, the problem sets could now be done
inside the classroom.
And the advantage there is, the real learning occurs
when you do the engagement, when you're doing the problem sets
and I think traditionally, students either don't do homework
or have trouble doing homework because there's no one
at home to help them out.
Now, they're in the classroom.
They have the teacher.
They have their peers, which is an underutilized resource
in the classroom.
Not only to help you but when you help others,
you learn a lot better.
And it also gives the teacher lens on how the class is doing.
When you're lecturing, it's very hard to know where people are.
I mean you might be able to pull them, ask a few questions
but it's very hard.
A lot of times, the students are a little bit, blank faces
but now, if you're doing problem solving together,
you can do much more,
you can understand where students are and diagnose them
and so that's the flip.
What used to be homework in the classroom,
what used to be
lectures, are now at home.
Makes the classroom interactive,
students can get lectures at their time and pace.
Great.
What I focus on a lot in the book is,
let's go even further because still, even the flip,
assumes that all the students are going to cover the same material
at the same pace together and what I talk a lot about,
is this
we've all been indoctrinated in the system
and when I talk about the system, I'm not talking about
what should be the student/teacher ration
or what charter or private or public.
I'm talking about the system.
I'm talking about grouping kids by age-based cohorts.
They cover certain subjects in a set pace.
We grade them based on their variable understanding
and then we keep pushing them forward
and we just assume that's what school is
but what I go through great lengths to show is,
no, this is actually relatively new phenomena.
It's about 200 years.
I mean, it's not that new.
So, 200 years old that we inherited from a country that no longer exists.
Nina: The Prussians (chuckles).
and even to us, I guess, it was
during the Industrial Revolution, was the first time
that people seriously thought about, "How can we educate everybody?"
Before that, it was, you're the son of a lord and you would get a,
king and you get a private tutor and the private tutor was a [goal] standard.
They're working at your pace and differentiating it for you
but now, all of a sudden in Prussia, there's like, "Okay,
"we wanna have mass education. How do we do it
"in a practical way?" and whoa, it's the Industrial Revolution.
Well, how do we do anything in a practical way?
We stick them on an assembly line and as they go through,
we do something to the product and then hopefully
at the end, we have a decent product.
And so, they essentially applied the same model to classrooms.
The kids are in these brackets based on age.
You know, it's funny.
I was talking to a friend and her child already knows
how to read and everything and she was trying to get the child
into the kindergarten.
He's like born in October or something and
and the school said, "Oh yeah
"he's a very bright kid but you know, we can't.
"He's too small."
and I told my frie-
and she came back, she's like, "Yeah, he's too small."
I was like, "Look, if that's what they were concerned about,
"they should be grouping them by size."
That's (laughs) the obvious natural, but so that's the model.
And even the flip is in the context of that model.
On week three, we cover parabolas.
Week four, we cover systems of equations and even if you have,
we give students grades.
We give them a B and that B shows that they have a gap in their knowledge,
A C, even a D, you can get an exam but then you move to the next topic.
That's usually building on top of that,
which is pretty much dooming you to failure.
Nina: Exactly.
Sal: And so, what, I advocate strongly
and we're already seeing this in schools, trying to experiment
or moving this direction is, if you take lecture out of the classroom,
there's no longer the need for everyone
to move together at the same pace.
And as soon as you get rid of that assumption,
you can completely rethink what a classroom can be.
You can start having everyone run at their own pace,
you can leverage class time when humans are together
for actual interactivity.
You can start saying, "Well, why do we only have one teacher
"in the room? Why can't we have two teachers in the room?
"Why do we have a bell ring?"
and this bell ringing, this is like a factory,
in a 19th century factory.
Why do we have a bell ringing that's saying, "Stop what you're doing
"on chemistry. You must now start English."
and we all know.
Anyone who's done anything creative because
that's the best way to stop creativity,
Nina: You're done.
Nina: Move on.
And so, what
what we've advocating is move to reality
with possibly the help of tools like Khan Academy
so that every student can run at their own pace.
Soon teachers have dashboards, tools that empower them
and that use class time for interactivity and creativity.
Nina: Right, right.
You touched on this a little bit but explain a little bit
about why is it that your platform has taken off
and is getting so much attention, when so many others were kind of trying
to do the same thing on the for-profit side,
some on the non-profit side haven't succeeded.
Sal: Yeah, it's an open question.
It's a question which we're constantly asking ourselves
because we know whatever the secret sauce is,
we don't wanna lose it somewhere in the process.
My best guess of why there's this initial way of traction
from 2006 to 2007, even it continuous to grow is,
those first videos I think it was fortunate
that it was just some guy making it for his cousins.
Nina: They were easy to use.
Nina: Or understand.
They felt very human.
And I think the big learning is, is that people were hungry,
I wasn't the first person to make videos on YouTube.
I wasn't the first person to think of teaching,
as soon as radio came out, people were saying, "Oh, we'll use this
"to teach the world." and then TV, "Oh, we'll use this
"to teach the world." and VCR.
Now, it's on demand.
But historically, it was either a videotape of someone
at a chalkboard, traditional class, which feels very,
it feels distant even when you're in the classroom.
You're there, I'm over here, the next step in the equation
and you do it like that.
So, that's very, not very [unintelligible]
and we make that into video.
It's even harder to see,
"What are they writing there? And I can't hear them."
and these felt very personal.
You're sitting next to me.
I think the other dimension of it is just a conversational tone.
I think a lot of people, they try to make it very polished,
which is not bad but in that process, you lose the humanity.
So, it sounds like your GPS system you know,
"The next step with this equation is when ... "
and I think hopefully, this is something that I try
to put into it is,
one of the things I think allowed me to do,
to kind of thrive in math or science and then eventually,
even finance was, I felt like I had a really holistic understanding of things
and my basics were really, really, really solid
and then my basics in algebra were really good.
So, when I went into calculus, I was like, "Oh
"this is intuitive." and when I went to corporate finance,
I was like, "This is intuitive. There's nothing new here."
and you see all the really, really smart people,
they're just learning for the next exam,
memorizing formulas then they forget it and then when they see
a related concept, it's like, "What's this?"
And so, what I tried in those early days for my cousins is,
give a sense of intuition, draw the connections between things
so that when they see this new concept,
it's not some random new concept.
It's connected to everything they learned before
and I get a lot of letters and I would have assumed that
that only been appealing to the motivated kids so to speak
but I get a lot of letters from kids that were traditionally,
disengaged or demotivated and they said, "That's why
"I was demotivated. No one was explaining the why.
"No one was giving me the connections."
So, hopefully, that's why people have been, I guess connecting
to the content.
Nina: Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about virtual education
and offering the types of things that you're offering.
A lot of people are still a little wary of these reforms.
They see it as a mechanism to ultimately get rid of teachers
in the classroom or reduce class sizes.
You talked a little bit about this in the book
and explain that a little bit.
Sal: Yeah, yeah.
No, I think that's a super important point
because whenever, when we've learned the last 15, 20 years
Nina: They think about robot replacement.
It's like, "Is that going to replace the physically?
The Barnes & Noble versus Amazon.com,
there's a natural contention there.
That's
exact opposite of the way I think is going to happen in education.
Everything we do is not going to replace a physical school.
I have young kids.
I want them to go to a physical school.
I want them to get interaction.
What it will do, is I think, give all of our children the experience
that I think every parent and every teacher or every student wants
to be a part of, and then even now, we're going to physical experience
but we're not leveraging the humans.
We're going but for the most part, people are sitting passively there
and they're listening.
It's hard for the teachers too because it's hard to just speak
for 60 minutes without getting that connection with the students
and so, what we're advocating is leverage tools,
so you can get maybe information delivery out of the way.
So you can get some of the problem solving out of the way
but so when people go and they have class time,
the scariest class time with other human beings that
that's optimally interactive and not interactive in the web sense,
interactive in the human sense.
Class time is all conversation.
Class time is all peer tutoring and working with their teacher.
Class time is all doing open ended projects and so,
I talk about this in the book and I gave a Ted Talk a bunch,
the irony here is I strongly believe and it's not just talk again,
we're seeing this in classrooms,
is that
you can actually use technology to make the classroom more human
and I'm very careful.
You mentioned there's skepticism.
I think there should be.
I'm skeptical when someone says,
"Hey, we just ordered 500 iPad for our school."
and I say, "Well, what are you gonna do with it?"
or, "How are you gonna integrate it into the curriculum?"
or, "How are you gonna leverage it to fundamentally transform
"what's going on?" and there usually aren't a lot
of answers there, and so, I think it is good to be skeptical
but at the same time, there is, I think a reason for hope.
Nina: How do you evaluate the impact of your courses?
Since again, you talked a little bit about grades in your book
and how you don't like the concept of grading.
How do you know that they have actually worked?
Sal: Yeah, and I'll tell you.
I mean a lot of times, when I grew up, I remember sometimes
we meet people who said, 'I don't believe in grades.'
and I thought they were these kind of like granola-bar hippie-type people
that you know, and now, I think I appreciate what they were saying.
Grades, normally when you say people who don't like grades,
you really think, they're being touchy-feely.
They're not being rigorous
but actually, they're saying grades aren't rigorous enough.
Grades are this thing that give this feeling of rigor.
Oh, A, B, A is , "Oh, you really know your stuff."
F, "You don't know your stuff."
One, they're somewhat arbitrary, depends on the test,
depends on how it's measured.
But even more than that, when you give grades,
especially, in the sense,
if you got a C on an exam, you have obvious weaknesses,
assuming that it was even a good exam.
You have obvious weaknesses.
That should be used as an assessment to say, "Okay,
"you need to now improve on those weaknesses,
"before we move onto a more advance topic." like it's common sense.
Get your basics down but instead, we use grades as a value judgment.
"You're smart. You're dumb. You're fast. You're slow."
and that's just going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, what we say is, "No, let's just make sure everyone masters every concept."
So rather than having superficial understanding of algebra
and then moving onto trigonometry, make sure you really understand
algebra deeply and then trigonometry's gonna make a lot more sense.
It's gonna be a lot easier to learn and if you master trigonometry
then calculus is going to start seeming very intuitive.
In terms of how we're doing it, we're working with schools,
and famously, Los Altos, which is now using Khan Academy.
It's probably one of the best, if not the best school district
in the country is using Khan Academy for 5th through 8th grade
as one of the tools that they use .
and there we have formal studies going on
to understand exactly, how this is impacting students and teachers,
both objectively on things like test scores and grades
but also on things
subjectively, "Are the teachers more excited about their work?
"Are the students more excited about their work?"
And then on top of that, we have 3 million problems down a day
on our site.
We have this huge number of students, 7 million a month using our site.
We have this treasure trove of data on our site itself.
Nina: Monitoring it on a daily basis.
Yeah, I mean all these other web companies are able to do.
We as a kind of education not-for-profit can now do,
using analytics, optimizing for engagements,
seeing what kind of learning is going on.
Nina: Great, great.
So, tell me a little bit about, you gave a great
historical overview of how we came to educate students today,
the way we're educating them.
Did you always hold these views and know this information
before you stumbled on the Khan Academy or this platform
that you created?
Or were these things that you studied afterwards?
Sal: (laughs)
Sal: It's been very serendipitous.
Sal: You know, it's been a combination.
I actually think it's more of the latter.
Obviously, all of us has spent a lot of time in the system.
I think the whole time, anybody who knew me growing up,
I mean, they knew that I was always like,
Nina: Questioning, right.
"Why can't I tutor?"
I used to get reprimanded for trying to tutor my-
This is sort of been a really positive interaction
and so, this question, you go to college and you're like,
"People are sitting in this lecture hall,
"is anything really happening in here?"
It seems like all the learning is happening under the cram session,
three days before the final and so, there is always
these ideas and then obviously, when I started working
with my cousins, I started seeing the ...
my cousins were motivated.
They were, for the most part, good students
but they were having these huge gaps in their knowledge.
Nina: It's called Swiss-cheese learning.
Swiss cheese learning (chuckles) etc., and so, and very pragmatically,
I started building these tools and it's really a process
of discovery.
Teachers e-mailing me, saying, "Hey, we're using it this way.
"We're using it that way." and so it's a combination of
these instincts of like, "Well, how did I learn?
"How do other people I know, who learn things holistically,
"how did they learn? What am I seeing with my cousins?
"What are teachers telling me?" and then it's kind of getting more
and more traction.
I started having people tell me about a lot of this stuff.
I mean, I knew a little bit about the history before.
I've heard about this whole committee of 10 in 1890,
somebody told me about that in high school.
But it was interesting that even the research,
the reasons why I made the video so short is
because YouTube limited me to 10 minutes but then
I used to have researchers telling me, "No, there's actually
"cognitive research that shows ..." and that's where a lot
of that research from the book come from.
Actually people, especially dance academic content can't pay attention
for more than 10 to 15 minutes.
So, it starts as, "Wow, so why are we doing this?
"Why are we using class time, this time with human beings
"for these hour-long lectures, sometimes 90-minute lectures,
"can't we get people to interact more?"
And the more I did research, a lot of these
kind of just basic common sense ideas [gelled] with research
and that's when you feel best about it
because they are common, every,
it's weird when research tells you something very non-intuitive,
but here it's telling you something very, very, very intuitive
and the only hard to grasp thing is that we're indoctrinated
into a strange model.
Nina: Right, right.
It all make sense.
Tell me a little bit about your own education.
I mean something despite the regiment of the system
that you grew up in, something must have gone right.
Was it a teacher?
Was it your parents you think who kind of built this sense
of inquisitiveness or was it, yeah,
did you go to a particular type of school that was open
to nurturing you as an individual
and paying attention to your specific needs?
Or yeah, did none of these things work and-
Sal: Yeah, no, no, no.
I mean I,
Nina: (laughs)
if I go and say that none of that stuff played in.
I mean I think there's probably a bunch of different factors
and I'm probably forgetting some of them.
One, I was blessed to have an older sister
who was a very good student, so I think that projected,
when I would walk into a classroom,
the teachers would remember my sister and say, "Oh, you're
"Farrah's sis- you're Farrah's brother, you must be."
and I was like in speech therapy and stuff when I was,
they would project that and there's actually now studies
that show that that projection has huge implications
for your own self-esteem.
That was luck.
On top of that, I went to just a,
I would say it was a public school in Jefferson Parish,
public schools in Jefferson Parish right outside of New Orleans.
I would say it was the average American public schools.
All of them, elementary, middle and high school
but there were some incredible teachers there.
I think in high school in particular, Mr. Hernandez, Miss Kennedy,
Miss Kennedy was a journalism teacher and actually, I would say
that's where a lot of the ideas that look, class should not be a lecture,
class should be working alongside the teacher.
It was journalism class, so we had a product, a creative product
and newspaper to work on.
I was the art editor and she would give us feedback
and she was like our senior peer and I remember those interactions
and a lot of the experience that I got from journalism.
I still think about it when I'm working on Khan Academy.
I think early in my schooling,
I think this was key and also lucky,
I got into you know, I don't know what they call it now,
these GT programs and what they did is,
you have this very structured Prussian curriculum for most of the day,
but then one day, a week, they take you out of a different classroom
and they take you to these GT classrooms
and there, you're going to this classroom, which is essentially,
the kind of classroom that ideally, everyone should have.
It was actually Miss [Roselle] and Miss [Crouse].
These two teachers and they had PhDs in education
and I remember the first day walking to GT
and Miss [Roselle] says, "What do you wanna do?"
and I was like eight and I was like
"I like to draw." and then she says, "Well, you should
"draw more then." and then she introduced me to these things,
different styles, different tools to draw,
"What else are you interested in?" and I was like,
"I like puzzles." and she's like, "Well, here's some puzzles."
She would give me these brainteasers and so she was mentoring me
and it was self-pace and I was able to go to my own pace
and there was other kids working on interesting things
and I would get inspired by them.
Sometimes, we would work on things
and I think we needed that breathing room to have re-
I wonder if I didn't have that experience early on in my life,
whether I would have had the ability to kind of self-direct
or the ability to say, "Oh, let me solve that problem."
No one you know, that's an interesting thing to tackle.
Nina: Right.
So along those lines, do you have any advice for parents out there
1st grader, 2nd graders and I'm asking you this
because in your book, you also highlight how a lot of students
in Southeast Asia, go to school in order to show off
what they know, not necessarily to learn in school.
Are there habits that you think parents can start
to put in place early on, despite how the schools are approaching education?
Sal: Yeah, and take everything I say with a grain of salt.
I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old,
Nina: (laughs)
of seven or eight-year-olds (laughs).
I'm proud to get my one-year-old off of the pacifier (laughs).
Nina: Well, now that you know, iPads are very popular.
Sal: You're absolutely right.
Sal: I mean my sense, having kind of gone through the system
and even we're observing, we're working with a lot of teachers,
we're working with a lot of schools now,
I would say there's a couple of dimensions here.
I think it is true.
Asians whether it's East Asian or South Asian,
there is a culture of school is where you go to show
what you've already learned at home.
I think that gives those students an advantage of having
this kind of buffer of their learning stuff maybe ahead
and I'm not saying that necessarily has to be the way
but it is a way to ensure that your student
in the Prussian model, doesn't get,
falls behind and as soon as they fall behind,
all of these negative self-perception things
and they start to reinforce each other.
I would do, I mean I'll tell you what I would do
with my own children.
I would do some combination of engaging them with a lot of the content
in a way before it becomes stressful
When I was teaching Nadia, algebra
when she was in algebra class, it was stressful for her
because she's like, "I need to catch up.
"I have an exam on it."
When I started teaching algebra to her younger brother
who's in 5th grade, he thought it was fun
because there's no stress here.
It was just a fun thing his cousin was teaching.
At least expose your kids to the ideas in algebra
and physics and biology and chemistry early on
so that when they see it in school,
they've already had some exposure.
The other thing I would say is, "Don't overschedule them."
I mean, I think sometimes the same parents that would, you know,
the same parents that would do the teaching ahead of time,
the same time, will also, "You have piano lessons.
"You have soccer lessons. You have everything."
and I think there's a value there definitely
but if it's complete overscheduling,
you have the loss of time for the child to develop their own creativity
kind of what I had in that GT class.
Frankly, in the ['80s], I was a latchkey child
where my mom, she worked these odd jobs
and would come along at 6 or 7:00.
And so, me and my sister would just hang out,
some of it was wasted watching TV but a lot of it was just this like,
"I wanna build something or I wanna draw."
We would make up games and stuff like that
and kids need that.
They need that free space and maybe if they're blowing it all
on video games or watching TV, you need to push them a little bit
or do something creative with them but they need that time for creativity
and the last thing I would recommend is that the parents themselves,
engage in learning because you set that example.
If you're 40 or 50 years old and you're going back
in learning algebra or cosmology or English lit,
it's a sure signal for students.
Nina: Let's talk about your vision for the ideal classroom
or this futuristic vision that you outlined here about
what the school of tomorrow should look like,
which is a lifelong learning approach to education.
I mean, you also talked about the college of tomorrow to look like.
I was fascinated by this but let's talk just about schooling,
your notions of class size as the ideal classroom,
could potentially have a hundred students in it
with four instructors roaming around and helping students.
We talked a little bit about grades already
but testing, this is one of those topics that comes up a lot
here in Washington and then with the discussions on Capitol Hill
but yeah, how would you describe that vision for us?
Sal: (laughs)
which is not gonna be popular but yeah, let's delve into this a bit.
Sal: Yeah, I know there's a lot there.
I mean the first to mention is
once you remove lecture from class time,
you say class time is time for interaction.
You can have students working at their own pace,
allows you to rethink everything and so, a lot of the concepts of this book
and a lot of these are happening.
I mean there's schools that we're working with,
that are doing these things.
They are experiments for their experiments
that all the research and all of the intuition point in that direction.
Teaching is for the most part, a solitary profession.
Nina: It's lonely profession.
It's lonely, it's lonely.
And so, you can have a hundred students,
you're not chaining the student/teacher ration.
You might even improve it.
but you now have four teachers in the same room.
Now, if one of them gets sick, students don't have a substitute teacher.
Different students are gonna connect with different teachers.
They can mentor each other.
They can do group things with the teachers together
but there's a whole dimension that you can add.
You could have a physics teacher, a math teacher,
a chemistry teacher and a biology teacher, all teaching simultaneously.
Students understand that all these sciences
and these math actually blend together.
They're not these siloed subjects.
They get a holistic understanding.
The test themselves, you need some aspect of testing
but you should be very skeptical of testing
because all test measure what they test
and there's many more [process] to a human being than that
and so, the dimensions that there could be some testing
to make sure that students are getting core competency
and some core skills but the more important skills,
which I think are completely unmeasured right now are creativity
and you could never get someone a creativity score
but you can have someone generate a portfolio of creative works.
As an employer, we're hiring engineers and
when we get these people great GPAs from top schools
in the country and they say, "What have you created?"
That's what engineer is,
building new things
and they haven't created anything
because they've been on the treadmill the whole time,
just trying to finish problem sets and they're very, very smart people.
And so, the ideal is that students over their careers can show
what they've created.
It's not like they write a paper that gets graded
and gets thrown away.
They write a paper, maybe gets graded
and then they keep working on the paper.
They keep developing it.
When they're 18, they have a novel done.
They have a bunch of papers on policy done
that they can show people, "This is my work."
They have computer programs written.
They build robots and on top of that,
and this is another dimension, that's completely missed
in the Prussian model so to speak is,
as
I think in any field, the people you wanna work with the most,
are the people who have deep subject matter expertise
but are also always willing to help others
and they have that communication and that ability
to empathize and
in our current system, we make everyone very focused on themselves,
"What are your grades? Are you going to pass the test?
"Cram for the next exam." and then the model
that we're describing, we're starting to see in a lot of schools,
let's focus everyone on each other.
So yeah, you go it your own pace,
you might be racing ahead and that's great.
You're stimulated, you're engaged
but you also have a chance to reengage with some students
who might be having difficulty and there's two things,
one, you're gonna be helping that student
but even better, when you explain that, hopefully,
and you develop your ability to explain,
you'll learn the material better and you'll learn to communicate.
You'll learn to empathize and that actually is measurable.
I mean you can have students rate each other.
You can have people write assessments for each other.
"Oh, you know, he understood the stuff but he was a little bit,
"you know, he spoke a little fast." and you could develop
that aspect.
I'd imagine the transcript of the future and I say the future
when I mean the future is like actually now.
Yeah, you would have your test scores.
Your test scores would actually show actual competency.
It wouldn't be grades.
It would be like, "Yeah, I understand algebra and I've renewed it.
"I've renewed that I know algebra well. I know cosmology.
"I'm a writer and here's my writings."
You have a portfolio of your creative works in multidimensions
and you have reviews from people that you've helped saying,
"Great person to work with. Really understood the subject matter.
"Really was able to communicate well." and those are things
that I think anyone would actually care about more
than just test scores.
Nina: Right but let's talk a little bit about what happens
in this classroom or school in terms of subject.
So, you believe that, so right now, you have to take math,
you have to take English language, arts, you start science
at a certain point in time.
I mean do you believe that all these basics should also be taught
in the school and at what point,
I mean another question I wanted to ask is,
do you believe that all children can learn
unless they have a serious disability?
Can they all progress to the levels that you have progressed to
if they simply learn and master and show an interest really
in the subject matter that they're studying?
And specifically, vis-a-vis the STEM fields,
which is science technology, engineering and math,
which are areas that kids tend not to get interested in.
Is it just because they haven't mastered it well
and been pushed to understand it early on
or are there limitations perhaps in how we are currently,
trying to get the students to learn these subjects?
Sal: Yeah, so on the latter question, if you asked me 20 years ago,
I'd have said, "Yeah, maybe certain people are pre-exposed
"to math and science and other people aren't."
and that made me feel good because I was one of the people
who were pre-exposed.
It made me feel like I was meant to be.
There wasn't luck but my experience with my cousins,
Nadia in particular, but other cousins and then what we're seeing in schools.
The schools that are kind of transitioning to
this type of a model where all the students are learning at their own pace,
building their foundations, we're seeing
day five, yeah, some kids have raced ahead.
Those are the gifted kids and some kids are falling behind
like maybe they need to be remediated and a traditional,
how you would separate them and you would actually tell these kids,
"You're smart."
You tell these kids either explicitly or implicitly,
"Hmm, you're not as smart." but what we're saying is
if you keep them together, but you allow them
to work at their own pace so that they're engaged,
they have mentorship from each other and the teacher,
many times, it's actually quite hard to predict.
We're trying to predict, it's very hard.
Some of these students were falling behind, maybe some in algebra class
and some of them didn't know multiplication well.
Some of them didn't know how to add fractions.
You give them that opportunity to really build that foundation
on negative numbers, multiplication, exponents, whatever it might be
and then these kids race ahead.
Their problem wasn't that they have some cognitive inability
to understand algebra, the problem was that they're sitting
in algebra class and for some reason, they didn't understand
how to multiply or they didn't understand how to add fractions.
They're just gonna feel silly in an algebra class
and you'll disengage really just to predict your own self-esteem.
I'm actually now more and more convinced that
pretty much everyone, barring certain exceptions,
we don't know where.
I mean, we're still learning.
We don't know but
progress far ahead and we're even seeing these classrooms.
We traditionally think motivated kids,
maybe that's 20% of kids but as soon as you allow people
to engage and fill in gaps without feeling embarrassed,
they start seeing it's not 20%,
it's 80 or 90% of kids, can start to feel engaged.
In terms of the first question about like what subjects and how,
I think it is an interesting and I talked a little bit about it
as, the subjects that are taught now are somewhat arbitrary.
They were decided in 1892 by the Committee of 10
mainly university, the male university presidents
who did not know about, you know this was before the Federal Reseve existed,
the Interstate Highway existed, knowledge of DNA
and a bunch of other stuff.
And they decided that at age 14, you should learn algebra,
at age 15, you should learn geometry,
at age 16, you should learn trigonometry and so on.
You should learn physics, your senior year in high school.
You should learn, I mean that's when it was decided
and it hasn't changed since.
I love all of those subjects.
I think they're all fascinating
but I think there are all these questions.
Should there be more statistics?
Statistics more valuable than calculus
or at least as valuable.
Should there be some knowledge of economics?
Who knows what it will be?
I mean, it's for the society to decide
but the general idea is
at minimum, it should be rethought within the last 120 years.
There is grounds, the world has changed.
We should think more about what these subjects are.
And even more, I think and you alluded to this,
should they even be divvied up in these siloed subjects?
These siloed subjects, these are,
we're indoctrinated into it, so it's hard for us
to break our minds from it.
This is the factory model.
You're at this machine in the factory
and so this is what will be poured into the product.
Okay, now you're gonna have the paint applied to you.
So now, you're gonna have the chemistry applied to you.
Now, you move on.
And for some people that might chip a little bit,
that's fine.
That'll be a cheaper product at the end
but the reality is this,
I mean chemistry is halfway in between physics and biology
and physics is halfway in between chemistry and pure mathematics
and all of them actually, have an aspect of philosophy to them.
All of them have an aspect of aesthetics to them
and whatever else and riding can be critical
and logical thinking is across all program,
you can have something like logic,
which is across everything.
And so, I think the reality we're moving to is
yes, you won't show competency in things.
So, yeah I understand this domain well.
So, you can go take an exam and then renew that exam
to show that, "Yes, I still understand that topic."
but while you're in school, some might be preparation
for that particular compentency but most of the time,
will be blending it where you're not working
to pass an assessment.
You're working to create things
and so, in the process of creating things,
whether it might be a novel or robot or business,
you're integrating all of these things.
I mean anyone who started a business,
if it's like a tech business, there's a comp,
there's art design, there's technology,
there's quantitative thinking and there's writing
and there's just human skills and you need to integrate it.
That's what actually matters in the real world.
When you break yourself from this assembly line model,
you give yourself the freedom for people to pursue
these types of things.
Nina: Why not create a Khan Academy Charter School
or even a Khan Academy Private School?
Sal: Yes, it's-
Sal: Yes, no.
Sal: I mean we go back and forth on that but I am,
we're thinking about it.
We're thinking about it.
Nina: Where would you put it?
Nina: Which country would you pick to ...
Sal: Well, for selfish reasons, I would probably put it
in Mountain View, California, (laughs) which would be walking distance
from, no but seriously, I think it's interesting
because, and this shows the emphasis we put.
I think a physical experience is incredibly, incredibly important.
A lot of people in Silicon Valley say, "What? You're at scale already.
"You're reaching 7 million, you're growing, you're doubling every year.
"You could reach 100 million students in five years,
"maybe a billion in your,
"and why are you even thinking about the physical,"
or, "Why are you thinking about physical schools?"
and I always say, "Well, that's because that's the core."
And I also think you need, you might say, "Well, why focus
"on one school that might be able to reach a few hundred kids
"when you're able to reach hundred million maybe one day?"
and the idea is if you can show examples of this
and there are schools that have already moved in that direction.
Los Altos moved in that direction.
Summit Prep, which is a charter school,
they've broken down walls.
They have multiple teachers teaching classes
in these kind of epic environments.
If you show examples of this, then I think that
that's what moves the dial forward.
Nina: So, how much would be the tuition?
Sal: The tuition would be you know-
Nina: The new school in New York, 40,000 a child.
Sal: Well, you know that's an interesting thing pe-
Nina: And it was built without this book and the vision that [unintelligible]
Sal: Well, no.
Sal: The money is fascinating.
Education is ...
Someone asked me recently is, "Can you ever spend too much
"on education?" and to some degree, the answer is no.
I mean it's such an important thing
but at the same time, if you're going to spend that much money,
you have to think seriously about how you're spending it.
I've met with some
officials about this and
at public level, charter or private schools and I just,
regardless of the school, I say, "How much do you spend
"per pupil per year?"
You ask a private school, some of them 25,000, 30,000, 40,000 a year.
You ask a public school,
some states, it's low.
It goes down to $5-6,000 a year but most states,
especially, on the east coast, it's 10, 15,000.
New York City public school is 18,000 a year.
Cambridge Massachusetts, $25,000 per year per student
and I say, "Okay, and what's your average class size?"
And they'll usually say, "Some number between 20 and 30."
I said, "Okay, private school, you're charging 30,000 a year,
"There's 20 students. That's $600,000 per classroom."
That's essentially for the te-
What's directly impacting the students?
The teacher, the classrooms and maybe the textbook.
Nina: That's it.
Sal: All, I can figure out is maybe there's 100,000,
150,000 being spent there.
Where is other quarter of a million or $300,000?
Same thing at any level.
Why can't we instead use, we can low-
The private school, I think for 10,000 a year,
instead of 40,000, 10,000 a year, you have 20 students
or let's say you have 30 students in the class,
that's $300,000 a year.
I say pay the teacher 150,000.
Make teaching, you know a lot of people pay lip service,
"Oh, we should you know, teaching should be on par
"with the doctors and engineers and lawyers."
I said, "Well, that's a nice lip service but if you really believe that,
"pay teachers the same as doctors, engineers and lawyers."
That's the best signal to society that you're actually valued
but the money is clearly there
and then it will have to get cut from all the stuff
that's not impacting the students.
All of the, I don't know.
Every time I ask this to people, I just do this back of the envelope calculation.
I mean this is what I used to do in my old career.
I used to speak to CFOs.
I say, "Oh, you're making this much, what am I missing?"
and the same exact question.
15,000 a year times 30 students is $450,000 a year.
The fully loaded cost of the teacher is
less than half of that plus to see,
where is that money going?
And so, I think you could do a very good model
for what public schools are spending.
Definitely, some of the more, the systems are spending
$10,000 plus.
Nina: So, talk a little bit about how Bill Gates came to discover you
and I just thought that chapter was so interesting
and yeah, I mean what was it like to find out all of a sudden
that Bill Gates was watching your videos
and what went through your mind?
Sal: I still wake up in the morning sometimes wondering
whether that was all made up or a dream.
The site have already gotten traction
but the summer of 2010, our first donors and/or
started sending me text messages
that Bill Gates was at the Aspen Ideas Festival,
telling the whole audience that he uses a site
that he thinks is great called The Khan Academy
and he uses it with his kids and he uses it himself,
which made me a little nervous because those were just for Nadia
but then you know (laughs) and I didn't know what to do.
I was like, "Do I reach out to him?"
I mean, I don't think he's listed or he's ...
but then his, two weeks later, chief of staff called
and said, "You know you might have heard Bill's a fan."
and I was like, "Yeah, yeah. I heard that."
and they said, "If you're free, we'd like to fly you up."
and I was looking at my calendar's completely blank
and I said, "Yeah, I think I could make it,
"make some time for Bill. I gotta cut my nails
"but other than that, (laughs) my schedule's flexible."
And I went up and I really articulated this,
look, the time it was mainly,
the videos I was doing but I was like, "Look, if we could get
"some resources." and I was dreaming about a five-person team
and some office space.
That was the dream at that point.
We could build out the software that I started doing
with my cousins so students can get practice,
they can get feedback.
We just started building a community on the site,
so the students can help each other.
We can build task ports for teachers
so that they could use it to diagnose students
and leverage class time more effectively
and him and then later Google as well, they were strong believers in that.
Nina: Great.
You talked a little bit about talent and creativity
in your book and we talked a little bit about this earlier on
but do you think, in the advent of all this
not advent but since, a couple of years ago,
there were books focused on talent.
Talent is Overrated,The Talent Code, you name it
Sal: (laughs)
who I'm trying to foster into a talented individual.
Do you think talent and creativity are things
that can be in fact, you know, taught to children
Sal: I don't think they're,
Sal: I'm not sure and frankly,
Nina: What's your thoughts?
I ...
My sense through both (chuckles) observation
and just even seeing what was happening there,
is it's not something that's taught
but it's something that can be untaught.
It's not something that it's not,
and it can be fostered or it can be suppressed,
both talent and creativity.
And I actually think probably all,
I think everyone is born with creativity.
I mean there's not a two-year-old on the planet,
who, if you introduce a new object into the room,
will not walk up to that object and manipulate it in every way,
taste it, feel it, see what they can do with it, pour something,
There's not a two-year-old on the planet.
There's not a five-year-old.
Actually, most five-year-olds will still,
a new object in the room, they will engage with it,
a new idea, they'll ask questions about it
but then something happens where they're taught
to become more passive.
To some degree, they are in an environment
where questioning is not always cool.
They're so overwhelmed with work,
whether it's soccer practice or homework
that there's no time for them to kind of just think about something.
The class is moving on.
They can't think about, "Wait, why am I carrying the one?
"Why does that make sense? It seems just like a formula to me."
They don't have time for that type of stuff
and so, all of these things, fall from this idea
of just breaking from this Prussian model,
breaking from this one pace fits the lecture.
As soon as you take that out,
now, all of a sudden, you can start saying,
"Hey, why we can't we let a student ..."
You know, right now, there's a 16-year-old some place
in the country, who has just some insight,
like, "Maybe cancer can be addressed in ... maybe this is what cancer is."
and too bad, the bell's gonna ring or they have an AP test the next day
or they have an exam, he's like, "Oh, I have too much work to do."
I have, I quote, an admissions officer in the book talked
about she was interviewing a bunch of people
who are coming to a very elite college and said,
"What do you daydream about?" and one student said,
"We don't daydream about anything
"because it doesn't help us to get into college."
And it's tragic for that child but it's tragic for society
because it's those daydreams that eventually lead to actual,
I'll tell you know, Khan Academy exist to a large degree
because my boss at the hedge fund, a very nontraditional
for that field, had a strong belief in life, work
in balance and so, I had time to daydream about the Khan Academy.
I had time.
And my wife was a medical resident so I felt bad sitting in bed
and watching TV and so, I was able to think about this problem
and make resources and I think anyone is capable of doing that.
We just have to give them the time and the breathing room to do it.
Nina: Especially now, since it appears, I don't know
if this was in your book or
I heard it from Tom Friedman.
I mean most of the jobs of tomorrow are gonna be jobs
that are gonna be created, not jobs that currently exist.
Sal: Yeah, exact- if you go, you know, the Prussian model started
in the Industrial Revolution and Industrial Revolution,
we needed probably more educated people than we needed
in a kind of an agrarian civilization.
We needed people who could read the directions
and have the discipline of the assembly line and all of that
but there's also, there's a certain passivity
that you also had to implicate.
In the farm, there's a certain independence and freedom to it.
All of a sudden, in a factory, you're doing this
over and over again and
one can debate whether it was explicitly done
but there was an element of instilling that passivity
in indoctrination so that people could be good workers
but now, we're [in reality],
Before the pyramid was like this,
you needed a few knowledge workers who are doing creative things
and then you needed a mass of labor.
Now, the pyramid's kind of inverted where we need a lot of creative people.
In fact, all of the real careers now are creative focused
and open ended and you need very few,
you need very little physical labor and in that reality,
we're training people for this while we need (laughs) the opposite.
Nina: Right and so since, we are in the nation's capital,
do you have any advice for congress
or the president?
How can they best
help bring this vision to life, understanding that?
Sal: Yeah, you know and this is,
it's an interesting question because we do meet
with state officials and federal officials and
even in other countries, ministries of education,
and the one thing that I don't want to happen is,
right now, it's been a very grassroots grounds up thing.
People of word of mouth, Khan Academy,
people have been using it.
Parents have been telling parents.
Teachers have been telling teachers and that's good
because that way, these are people who wanna make it work
and they figured out and they tell us ways
to make it work better.
As soon as you make it top down, I think it becomes,
no one likes it anymore.
And so, we want this to be very grassroots.
What I really tell people is just tell people about it.
Tell people, [tell them] they have a free tutor.
Tell teachers that look, there might be another model
that you probably will enjoy more.
There are ways to reach more students
and on top of that, and I'm serious about this,
I think they should set an example.
It's become too, it's too easy now in our society
for people to say, "Oh, I'm not good at math."
And they'll say it out loud like 6th grade math.
"Oh, I don't know. That's math. I don't understand it."
No one will say, "Oh, I can't read at a 6th grade level."
or, "I can barely write."
No one says that but people say, you'll hear politicians say that.
You'll hear CEOs say that.
You'll hear people in the press say that
and I think that messaging should change
and frankly, the only way that it could change,
is if they directly engage with it.
I mean it's shocking how many people are engaged in education policy,
where they don't know the subject matter themselves.
They're like, "Oh, I'm not good at math but
"this is how we should test math teachers."
It's like, that's crazy.
You yourself should engage in the content or get a depth in the content
and that'll be a huge signal to society
and I think it also help inform policy
and I think the more they do that,
they'll realize that it's a lot less about taught down,
a lot less about the controls.
The controls that they do, every iteration of ed reforms is just
about more controls on teachers and it might
de-risk some of the weaker players but it also handicaps all the rest
and so it kind of gets into this culture of everyone getting
to mediocre and what we really need to do is go the other way.
Be much more grassroots.
What I point on this book, that's an American thing
that we're a country that's focused on creativity,
we're a country that's focused on people taking ownership
over their lives but our school system is a Prussian one.
One that's about passivity.
One that's about authority and everything about this book is,
let's make our school system more American.
Nina: Yeah, so any final thoughts?
If you were sitting with President Obama at the White House,
aside from asking him to use his bully pulpit more,
Sal: I'm somewhat serious about it.
Sal: I will ask him to ...
This is somewhat a different dimension but we talked about this in the book.
I would ask him to make content for us
because I think what's happening right now is the public discourse.
It's so disjointed in these 30-second soundbites
that you can't have a chance to go deep
on either side of the aisle and right now,
the main adult learning happens on the 24-hour news.
It's in this 30-second soundbites.
So, no one really understands the issues
and it just becomes very emotionally, charged.
And this form factor, this way, it's a chance for Obama
to really explain why he makes the decisions he does
and maybe the opposition to really explain why
and get to it and diagram it out and even have a quiz afterwards
to make sure that people are retaining it.
It would kind of fill in that gap in learning
that frankly, people are creative.
Some of our most popular videos are about Credit Default Swaps
or the Healthcare Plan or the Electoral College.
These are gaps in people's learning
and adults of any age want to learn that.
Nina: Yeah, well, it was a pleasure reading this book.
It was nice meeting you.
Thanks for joining us.
Sal: Oh, it was a pleasure.