The following video features Sal Khan, creator of Kahn Academy, talking about his vision for the future of education. It’s six minutes long and worth watching.
As mentioned in the video, Khan started an organization called SchoolHouse.world that has free online tutoring and supports group learning.
His vision is to support the kind of interactive online teaching that first led him to create Kahn Academy. As that grew, pre-made videos had to replace synchronous interactions, but he sees his new venture as a way to bring the latter to scale, by connecting learners and tutors in a world-wide virtual schoolhouse.
My husband Ian and I both think this is a worthwhile direction to move in, replacing the classroom one-size-fits-all approach with individual (or small group) tutoring and individually-paced learning, allowing people to get used to that idea.
Where we disagree is that Ian believes that using ’schoolhouse’ in the domain name, and in Kahn’s descriptions of his vision, will have the effect of undermining the effort by constantly nudging people back to what they are comfortable with, instead of towards something new and different.
I point out that Khan uses the words education, tutoring, and schoolhouse (and variants) approximately an equal number of times in the video. I imagine that the word schoolhouse evokes the old days, when kids may have actually learned to read. It’s familiar. Ian counters that they’ve never learned to read in school, which I can’t disagree with. But it is what people think. Maybe they even use it as a marketing technique.
Ian cites Confucius, who reminds us that ‘the first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names’. Because if people call things by their wrong names, they are likely to talk past each other rather than with each other.
Instead of asking, “What should the school of the future look like?”, Ian thinks Kahn should be asking: What comes after schools? And that he should use some other term entirely.
I’m curious to know what other people think about this. Does using “schoolhouse” undermine a shift to individualized learning?
