Education

I'm a big fan of Khan Academy. I think it is genius and I have fun learning on it. But I think Khan makes a great point about how we learn and it has me thinking about a lot of different areas of education.

In a typical educational setting a teacher will teach their block of content and give a test to see how well the students are grasping the material. Let's just say the students take that test and a few get 95% correct, several more get 85% correct, and a several get 75% correct. The question is what will happen in the very next class after the test.

The answer is that in most cases the teacher moves on to the next block of content. I suppose some teachers may take a few moments going over what was missed but it is doubtful that such a review is very thorough. The fact is a good portion of the students do not understand 25% of the content, the average student in the class doesn't understand 15% of the content, and even the brightest students do not understand 5% of the content. A few subjects can handle this problem because understanding the new block of content has little impact on understanding the previous block of content. But most subjects build on previous learning so this lack of understanding is just not acceptable.

When I was at boarding school I remember a teacher arriving who taught my brother's class and a few other classes below me. I remember that one of the things he wanted to do was teach basic English grammar no matter how long it took. If nothing else those kids were going to know about sentence structure, verbs and nouns, adjectives and adverbs, and all the rest. I think that was brilliant. I think a lot of us went through school learning only about 75% of what we needed to know about grammar. A thorough understanding would have been a blessing.

I also admire Kahn's approach to using technology to actually humanize education. In many cases technology has the effect of de-humanizing whatever it is we are using it for. How many times have you heard people complain about automated answering systems when calling a company or organization on the phone? Using technology to increase the value of our human interaction is something we need to work on a lot more.