Hidden in Plain Site: Liberal Arts Courses on Khan Academy
Salman Khan is the most important revolutionary in education in recorded history.
One man's afterthought by 2015 was educating 26 million students.
Khan Academy is a 501(c)3 nonprofit with a mission to change education for the better by providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. We believe that students of all ages should have free, unlimited access to the best educational content, and that they should be able to consume and master this content at their own pace. In addition, we believe that there are incredible opportunities to use intelligent software development, deep data analytics, and intuitive user interfaces to more effectively surface and present these educational resources to students and teachers around the world. Our library of content covers kindergarten to early college math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and reaches into humanities with tutorials on economics, finance, music, philosophy, and art history. We have over 26 million registered students and to date, we have delivered over 580 million lessons and 3.8 billion exercise problems.
That was way back in October, at the beginning of the school year. Take a look at its most recent Alexa traffic ranking.
The lower the number, the higher the ranking. There are over a billion websites.
It will grow to 50 million students by 2025 -- maybe sooner.
No one in history has ever educated more than a few thousand, and only in one or two courses. He is educating them K-12.
This is historically unprecedented. We are seeing a world revolution taking place, yet no one is factoring this fact into their projections.
THE THREAT TO PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
The stalwarts of American progressive education would be horrified. The supreme pedagogical winner in the 200-year education marathon is a graduate of M.I.T. and Harvard Business School.
Think about this. Progressive education has been based on control over American education by the central institutions of teacher training and certification, what used to be called "normal schools," but which academically were always below normal academically. They were the teacher colleges that trained armies of narrowly educated young women to teach in tax-supported public schools. Then there are the universities that train teachers in education departments, which are extensions of the government.
We all learned this aphorism early: "He who can, does. He who can't, teaches. He who can't teach, teaches teachers."
Khan has relegated them all to teachers' assistant status. He has no teaching credentials, yet he is providing both the content and the pedagogy of modern education, K-12. He is exporting it around the world.
The educational establishment will never regain control. It's over.
No one notices.
One man with a low-cost software has undermined 170 years of American education and two centuries of Prussian education.
But what, exactly, are he and his hired high school teachers teaching? What is the content?
No one seems to know.
NO MONITORS
To view the titles of the courses, click here.
The Right should be monitoring this. So should the schools of education.
A technical revolution is replacing Western education, and no one is paying attention.
I am too busy copying his approach with the Ron Paul Curriculum to pay attention. But if I ran a conservative think tank, I would assign at least three full-time staffers to take courses and provide analysis.
The Khan Academy will provide the worldview of the English-speaking world's educational system from now on.
I applaud Khan for doing the ultimate end run around classroom-based public education. He has shown that homeschooling is better than classroom education. The public school classrooms are now adopting his program. The Khan Academy is the tail that is steadily wagging the dog of tax-funded, classroom-based education.
What will the rest of us do to use it, provide modifications of it, or provide narrowly marketed alternatives to it?
The Ron Paul Curriculum is a needle in Khan Academy's haystack, yet it is the only privately funded K-12 alternative where all of the lessons are video-based, just as Khan's are. It is self-taught, just as Khan's is.
The future is visible for all to see. But no one is monitoring its content.