What Does the Khan Academy Teach in the Social Sciences?
If we are to believe Khan Academy's reports, it teaches something in the range of 25 million students. Half are outside the United States.
Nothing like this has ever happened: one man providing K-12 education for 25 million students. It may be 100 million in ten years.
No educator can catch up. He has a lock on this market.
Is there any other market more desirable than this market? Around the world for a century, governments targeted this market. They have spent large chunks of national productivity to control these markets. They are compulsory markets.
Yet here is one man with no certification from any civil government who is providing both educational content and teaching structure for 25 million students.
I regard this as the most significant end run around the world's political establishments ever pulled off by anyone.
It gets even more amazing. If I were a full-time politician, and I wanted to get some idea of how well-educated people will be voting in 20 years, I would begin with a detailed analysis of the social science courses on the Khan Academy. Yet no one has done this.
Some of the best tax-funded high schools in the United States have adopted the Khan Academy as a supplement to classroom education. This is a complete reversal of reality. Khan's instructors are providing the lectures and the testing. The classroom teachers are supplementary to the Khan Academy.
Ideologists of all persuasions ought to know what is being taught. Nobody has any idea. Nobody seems to care. I am too busy to find out. I have put together the Ron Paul Curriculum. That has taken all of my spare time ever since the spring of 2013. It is almost complete. I adopted this approach: "You can't beat something with nothing."
There is now an online alternative to Khan. It took three years. If I had been handed a budget of a million dollars, I could have done it in one year. Maybe.
There are billionaires out there who could easily have funded a Left-wing version. None of them thought of this. It's now too late. He captured the market.
I have heard nothing about what is being taught. That may indicate that's it's middle-of-the-road. Or it may just indicate that the well-funded think tanks of the Right and the Left have so little interest in K-12 education that they are not willing to spend $250,000 to hire a dozen grad students to monitor it and write reports. This is my assessment. They just don't care.
Here, hidden in plain sight, is an educational revolution, pedagogically speaking. Nobody notices. He is running the largest educational experiment in history, and no one knows what he is teaching. I don't mean math and science, for which he is famous. I mean business, economics, government, and American history.
For better or worse, Khan has captured the largest chunk of the world's students that anyone has ever picked off. He did it with the financial blessings of Bill Gates. Gates is a college dropout.
This is astounding. It shows the power of individual creativity. It shows the power of the word "free." It shows, above all, the power of the free market. One man stumbled into this: online teaching with YouTube videos. The educational establishment did not see this coming. It is playing catch-up. If it catches up, it will destroy its own model, which is based on three pillars: state compulsion, state licensing, and tax money. Khan has shown that the world does not need any of the three pillars of establishment education.