Salman Khan > Quotes

“I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him.
—Salman Khan”
― Salman Khan

“Don't waste inspiration”
― Salman Khan

“Can you imagine if someone told Einstein, Okay, wrap up this relativity thing, we’re moving on to European history? Or said to Michelangelo, Time’s up for the ceiling, now go paint the walls. Yet versions of this snuffing out of creativity and boundary-stretching thought happen all the time in conventional schools.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“My basic philosophy of teaching was straightforward and deeply personal. I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught. Which is to say, I hoped to convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe. I wanted to pass along to students not only the logic but the beauty of math and science. Furthermore, I wanted to do this in a way that would be equally helpful to kids studying a subject for the first time and for adults who wanted to refresh their knowledge; for students grappling with homework and for older people hoping to keep their minds active and supple.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary? The answer, I think, lies not in the perceive virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day... The broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture... turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“for All Ages Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age. —MARGARET MEAD”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“These are the kinds of curious, mysterious, and original minds that often end up making major contributions to our world; to reach their full potential, however, they need the latitude to follow their own oblique, nonstandard paths. That latitude is seldom found in a conventional, box-shaped classroom in which everyone is supposed to be doing the exact same lesson, and “differentness” is generally used as a negative.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“On the one hand, our society now views a college education as a gateway to employment; on the other hand, academia has tended to maintain a bias against the vocational.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In a traditional academic model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the comprehension of the concept is variable. Washburne was advocating the opposite. What should be fixed is a high level of comprehension and what should be variable is the amount of time students have to understand a concept.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“The world needs all the trained minds and bright futures it can get, and it needs them everywhere.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Alarmist rhetoric aside, the United States is not about to lose its primacy because students in Estonia are better at factoring polynomials. Other aspects of U.S. culture—a unique combination of creativity, entrepreneurship, optimism, and capital—have made it the most fertile ground in the world for innovation. That’s why bright kids from all around the globe dream of getting their green cards to work here.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Even as our world is being daily transformed by breathtaking innovations in science and technology, many people continue to imagine that math and science are mostly a matter of memorizing formulas to get “the right answer.” Even engineering, which is in fact the process of creating something from scratch or putting things together in novel and non-self-evident ways, is perplexingly viewed as a mechanical or rote subject. This viewpoint, frankly, could only be held by people who never truly learned math or science, who are stubbornly installed on one side of the so-called Two Culture divide. The truth is that anything significant that happens in math, science, or engineering is the result of heightened intuition and creativity. This is art by another name, and it’s something that tests are not very good at identifying or measuring. The skills and knowledge that tests can measure are merely warm-up exercises.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Education for All Ages Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age. —MARGARET MEAD”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Our schools should be the same—environments for safe experimentation, viewing failure as an opportunity for learning rather than a mark of shame.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“It’s not about graduation rates and test scores. It’s about what those things mean to the outcome of human lives. It’s about potential realized or squandered, dignity enhanced or denied.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Entire industries and some of our very largest professions depend on the persistence of our current system. Other social institutions—like giant publishers and test-prep companies—are synched to its workings. A certain teaching method implies certain goals and certain tests. The tests, in turn, have a serious impact on hiring practices and career advancement. Human nature being what it is, 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; our educational customs tend to perpetuate themselves, and because they interconnect with so many other aspects of our culture, they are extraordinarily difficult to change.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In one such study, it was observed that students in mastery programs “developed more positive attitudes about learning and about their ability to learn.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“It’s awfully difficult to appraise the quality of tests except by way of the test results.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Even better, you can still do a lot of learning while on the road now that you have access to self-paced videos and exercises. The same flexibility would apply to teachers. Because of the multiteacher environment, teachers could stagger vacations during the year. No one would be asked to give up a restorative break or time for travel, but these would happen without the need of shutting down the entire system.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“It is the connections among concepts—or the lack of connections—that separate the students who memorize a formula for an exam only to forget it the next month and the students who internalize the concepts and are able to apply them when they need them a decade later.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“as the centerpieces of student appraisal, two things: a running, multiyear narrative not only of what a student has learned but how she learned it; and a portfolio of a student’s creative work.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“exaggeration”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“The danger of using assessments as reasons to filter out students, then, is that we may overlook or discourage those whose talents are of a different order—whose intelligence tends more to the oblique and the intuitive. At the very least, when we use testing to exclude, we run the risk of squelching creativity before it has a chance to develop.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation. —SAINT AUGUSTINE”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“The problem is that as the pace of change accelerates all around us, the ability to learn new things may be the most important skill of all.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined