Khan Academy Is Better Than (Most Of) The Writing About Khan Academy
4 min read
I've been spending some time recently looking at Khan Academy from a few different angles. This is something I probably should have done earlier, but I was so put off by some of the writing about Khan Academy that I almost made the mistake of discarding the subject because of the ill-formed praise directed at it. And this would have been unfortunate, because there is a lot to like about Khan Academy.
But getting into Khan Academy can be difficult if you actually read about it first, because many of the writers who attempt to cover Khan Academy invariably use Khan Academy as a vehicle for some other narrative about education.
From the Huffington Post:
Khan says his personal view is that "teachers unions don't act in the interest of most teachers. Many of the best teachers I know are being laid off because their unions value seniority over intellect, passion, creativity and drive."
Quotations like this - quotations that fetishize youth, and perpetuate the myth that an experienced teacher can't be intellectually curious, passionate, creative, or driven - really don't help. Generalizations about any profession are bound to be inaccurate. The fact that Salman Khan can make good videos shouldn't delude anyone into thinking he knows about teacher professional development, or the craft of working with kids.
We get this gem from Fast Company:
As thousands of college students graduate with no hope for employment, and the United States continues to lag behind others in math and science, citizens will be seeking some type of change. Perhaps Khan’s proposals are as likely as any.
This quotation is notable because it perpetuates the narrative that US scores are failing wholesale, and it embeds this narrative in an otherwise worthless puff piece on Khan Academy.
But, as we see here, if we actually look at the effect of socioeconomic status, the kids of rich people in the US get a great education. It's only the poor folks who get shortchanged.
One of the more notable articles about Khan comes from Clive Thompson at Wired. In the interest of brevity, I limited myself to only selecting one quotation from this article, but really, it is sufficiently bad to be worthy of several posts shredding its nearly infinite inadequacies.
Reformers today, by and large, believe student success should be carefully tested, with teachers and principals receiving better pay if their students advance more quickly and getting canned if they fall behind. They’re generally in favor of privately run charter schools and hotly opposed to the seniority rules of the teachers’ unions, if not the existence of unions altogether.
This quotation perpetuates the falsehood that all people looking to improve schools see unions as the problem, and more testing, more charter schools, and merit pay as the solution. It's unclear whether this fallacy is executed due to bad writing, intellectual laziness, or utter cluelessness about the educational landscape, but, for example, the folks at the Save Our Schools March are clearly interested in reform, yet share none of the attributes cited by Mr. Thompson.
But here's the thing: despite the hype machine in place behind Sal Khan, what he has created is actually better than the hype lets on. It's also different than the hype; the people hyping it are missing some of the better aspects of Khan Academy.
Over the next few days, I'll be putting out some additional posts looking at other aspects of Khan Academy. As I said earlier, the low quality of much of the writing about Khan Academy almost dissuaded me from looking at it altogether, and that would have been a mistake.
For those of you looking for examples of good writing about Khan Academy, look no further than Audrey Watters over at Hack Education. Her recent post, as well as her past writings on Khan, provide a good overview.
Image Credit: "Facepalm" taken by Santiago GarcÃa Pimentel, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license.
