“This story starts with one student and one teacher.” That is how Salman Khan starts his book The One Room Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined. One student and one teacher. Khan himself, of course, is the teacher. The student is his cousin Nadia, a bright, motivated twelve-year-old. Nadia believed that she was bad at math, for the simple reason that she had received a lower-than-normal score on the math portion of one of her tests. Khan offered to tutor her to help bring up her scores, and thus the idea of the Khan Academy was born.
It wasn’t like one day there was nothing, then poof! Khan Academy was founded. It took many years and perseverance through many trials for Salman Khan to make his dream a reality. Once, on the day he was supposed …show more content…
One of the most powerful things he brought up on the topic was about how our ancestors needed to eat three meals a day, but since we don’t do as much manual labor we don’t need to. He then tied it to education; “Why, then, do most of us cling to the habit of eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, even though most of us today do much less manual labor than our ancestors who started this custom? The answer is simply this: It’s what we’ve always done, just as we’ve always sent our kids to certain kinds of schools that operate in certain kinds of ways. It’s a cultural habit that we take for granted.” I loved this quote, because it really opened my eyes to the truth behind it. The main reason that most education systems won’t change is because they are already there! Khan backs up his points with another piece of evidence that I thought was really powerful. “For all its flaws, however, the standard model has one huge advantage over all other possible education models: It’s there. It’s in place. It has tenure. The tendency is to believe that it has to be there.” As soon as I read that line, I realized Khan was right. One of the only advantages the public school system and traditional model have over any other option is that they are already in place! That may seem like a small matter but it is really the only reason these systems founded by the Prussians are still in place. He supports this idea with “Those who prosper under a given system tend to become supporters of that system. Thus the powerful tend to have a bias toward the status quo.” He is claiming that the powerful people that have been through this education system are biased for it, because they believe it helped them become the way they are. This may or may not be true in all cases, but the point makes a lot of sense. If I completed high school education at Acton and went on to become a successful politician, I would probably
It wasn’t like one day there was nothing, then poof! Khan Academy was founded. It took many years and perseverance through many trials for Salman Khan to make his dream a reality. Once, on the day he was supposed …show more content…
One of the most powerful things he brought up on the topic was about how our ancestors needed to eat three meals a day, but since we don’t do as much manual labor we don’t need to. He then tied it to education; “Why, then, do most of us cling to the habit of eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, even though most of us today do much less manual labor than our ancestors who started this custom? The answer is simply this: It’s what we’ve always done, just as we’ve always sent our kids to certain kinds of schools that operate in certain kinds of ways. It’s a cultural habit that we take for granted.” I loved this quote, because it really opened my eyes to the truth behind it. The main reason that most education systems won’t change is because they are already there! Khan backs up his points with another piece of evidence that I thought was really powerful. “For all its flaws, however, the standard model has one huge advantage over all other possible education models: It’s there. It’s in place. It has tenure. The tendency is to believe that it has to be there.” As soon as I read that line, I realized Khan was right. One of the only advantages the public school system and traditional model have over any other option is that they are already in place! That may seem like a small matter but it is really the only reason these systems founded by the Prussians are still in place. He supports this idea with “Those who prosper under a given system tend to become supporters of that system. Thus the powerful tend to have a bias toward the status quo.” He is claiming that the powerful people that have been through this education system are biased for it, because they believe it helped them become the way they are. This may or may not be true in all cases, but the point makes a lot of sense. If I completed high school education at Acton and went on to become a successful politician, I would probably