What you can learn from Khan

What can you learn from Khan?

Turns out, damned near anything.

First, let’s get this out of the way. I am not talking about this guy :

Nor am I talking about this guy :

No, I am talking about Salman Khan, otherwise known as this guy :

I just watched that Ted talk recently, and it really has my mind abuzz with thoughts about education.

For a long long time, I have thought we do education wrong. We strap our kids down and force-feed knowledge to children like it is a bitter pill they absolutely must swallow, and then regurgitate, and then wonder why kids hate school, hate reading, hate learning, and hate their teachers.

Children inherently want to learn. Everything they do as play is a result of this instinct to learn, explore, and understand. They are born insatiably curious, and it only by diligent long-term torture that we beat that out of most of them.

Our model of education has not changed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it is very much an assembly-line model. Get the kids into one place, give them the information, ring a bill, everyone goes to the next information station, and at the end of work periods, quality assessment.

But children are not machines. The mind of a child is not some kind of tabula rasa just waiting for us to write on.

Children are living breathing human beings who desperately want to learn how the world works, but want to do it in an active and interactive manner that can accommodate all the different learning styles. Individualized learning is what is called for, and yet, teachers say they just don’t have the time.

Enter Salman Khan. His idea of education is remarkably like the one I have had since I formulated it way back in my college days when dinosaurs walked the earth and I took a course called the Philosophy of Education at UPEI.

But what he adds to the picture is this notion of “flipping the classroom”. That means that watching a Khan lecture on a subject is not the lecture, it’s the homework. All the kids show up to school having already has the lecture on the subject, and at their own pace, with as much backtracking and rewinding and looking things up as necessary to boot.

This frees up the teacher to spend all the class time actually helping the kids do the thing they have been taught. The teacher can circulate in the classroom and see who is struggling, and offer them help when they need it, but otherwise leave the kids to figure it out either by themselves or with the help of their friends.

For a long time, I have thought that our ancient model of education reduces the role of the teach to basically being a piece of audio-visual equipment. They are just there to broadcast the curriculum at the students and then test them on it. Helping them learn it and do it is a luxury squeezed in between lectures. For the most part, they just there to lecture.

And here’s the thing : lecturing is actually the least important part of education. It is the part of the job that is the most menial, repetitive, and unpleasant for both teacher and student.

Teachers hate repeating the same things year after year, and students hate being forced to sit still and do nothing but listen for hours on end. Nobody is happy. And yet we put up with it because it is “normal” so we do not even think about it.

But if you automate the lecturing, suddenly the teachers are free to truly teach, and the individualized learning model is not just possible but preferable.

Full disclosure mode : Admittedly, I would have thrived in a system like that. I was ridiculously bright and learned extremely fast. If I could have done the learning and testing on my own, I would have zoomed through my education at light speed, instead of spending 90 percent of class time bored out of my mind and wishing I was anywhere else.

Heck, I would have found work that actually challenged me. Imagine that.

But I also think all the other kids would have benefited from that kind of education as well. The slow kids would have gotten tons more teacher time to help them get through the rough parts. The bright kids like me would have been happy to zoom along on our own most of the time. And the average kids would greatly benefit from a system that lets them learn at their own speed and in their own way.

The great thing about a system like that is that it rewards curiosity and initiative, and thus harnesses children’s inherent curiosity and enthusiasm instead of punishing it like out current system does.

It’s a little like food. The child can always have more when they want more, and stop when they are full and need to digest what they have just eaten.

And if they get indigestion from something, they can always go to the teach for…. um, nevermind. That metaphor is best ended right there.

I hope that these experimental programs scattered hither and yon that use the Khan “flipped classroom” approach will inspire an entire educational reform movement that sweeps the world and finally puts an end to this terrible, outdated, inefficient, inhuman, inhumane, and above all wrong system we have all over the world now.

Don’t get me wrong. Even out current broken-down system of education is far better than no education at all. And I am most vehemently not saying that we should replace all teachers with computer monitors.

But the history of human technological progress has been a story of people coming up with ways to automate the part of the task that is most menial and repetitive and that takes the least amount of intelligence, and thus freeing up human potential to focus on the higher order parts of the task,.

There is no reason why we cannot do this for education with the technology of today.

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