The Write Reader: 126. "The One World Schoolhouse" by Salman Khan

Sunday, September 2, 2018

126. "The One World Schoolhouse" by Salman Khan

Khan, Salman. The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined. New York, NY: Twelve, 2012.

256 pages.

Reviewed by Jess d'Artagnan Love

Salman Khan is most well known as the creator and leader of the Khan Academy, a tool used frequently across education facilities. I think he prefers to go by Sal so he isn't confused with the famous Bollywood actor, Salman Khan (rawr). The One World Schoolhouse documents the process Khan went through in creating Khan Academy. It all started when Sal started tutoring his niece long distance and needed tools to make their work together more effective. This resulted in a set of videos that taught basic math and a fledgling Youtube channel that made the videos easily accessible.

Khan attempts to provide a broad history of the American education system and why the system functions the way it does. This section was highly problematic. Khan cherry picked his research, failing to show the entire story and leaving out seminal, groundbreaking work by scholars like Jean Piaget and Benjamin Bloom. It was almost unethical the way the information was presented. He made it seem like he was giving readers the full story but he wasn't. I couldn't help but feel like he could benefit from taking a few more courses in research and writing. He bias towards math and sciences over art and humanities was painfully obvious. The arts and humanities were always mentioned as secondary to STEM rather than being a critical part of education.

Another problem with Khan's assessment of the educational system is that he functions under the assumption that the only way students' learning is being assessed is through standardized tests (think bubble sheets and scantrons). This is far from what educators are actually doing to assess student learning. Educators are using tests, yes, but they aren't idiots. They understand that a test isn't necessarily the best was to assess learning. That is why there are other assignments (the dreaded HOMEWORK that Khan bagged on in one of his chapters) such as papers, multimedia projects, and group assignments which Khan fails to mention in any way except negatively.

The rest of the book can be summed up by the last part of the title: reIMAGINED. Imagined. Imaginary. The rest of the book where he discusses the future of higher education was a rambled fantasy. It had no basis in reality or in current research or academic trends. I wish I could meet him so that I could say, "Hey Sal, my university has been doing the things you describe in your book for almost a decade before you published your ideas." Truly, the ideas he had that were solid weren't entirely new (and not ENTIRELY HIS. He tap danced on plagiarism through the whole book!) and the ideas that were new had no basis in research or educational theory, or even economics.

Bottom line: the best part of this book was learning about how the Khan academy was developed and that would honestly be better told in a magazine article rather than in a book.

Recommended for: readers who like Khan academy and what to learn about how it was create BUT who can also read with a critical eye toward the lack of research in the rest of his writing.

Not Recommended for: readers who want an ACCURATE depiction of the educational system.

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