Here is one of the most ancient questions in the history of education: Can creativity be taught?
No one yet has come up with a definitive answer to that riddle, and I certainly don’t presume to offer one here. But I will say this: Whether or not creativity, still less genius, can be taught, it can certainly be squelched. And our current factory model of education seems perversely designed to do exactly that.
Nearly everything about our current system rewards passivity and conformity and discourages differentness and fresh thinking. For most of the conventional school day, kids just sit while teachers talk. Cloistered away with students their own age, they are deprived of the varying and often mind-stretching perspectives of kids both more and less advanced. They move in lockstep through rigid, balkanized curricula aimed less at deep learning than at the fulfillment of government mandates and creditable performance on standardized tests.
If this lockstep education inculcates a chilling fear of falling behind, an even more insidious outcome is that it also undermines the whole idea of moving ahead. Why learn what you won’t be tested on? Why go where the overworked and stressed-out teacher won’t have the time or energy to follow? Thus initiative is frowned upon, making it clear that conventional education—whatever the political slogans happen to say—is not about excellence; it’s about minimizing risk, eliminating downside surprises. Inevitably, however, the upside is muted as well. In this straitjacket of a system, the successful student—the student who gets A’s—is the one who does the expected thing, who plows dutifully ahead on the path of least resistance. Does it take a measure of intelligence and discipline to succeed along this narrow path? Yes, of course it does. Does it call for any sort of originality or specialness? Probably not.
Even our usual extracurricular activities tend to encourage an orderly plodding along predictable paths. In the name of making kids well rounded—which of course is code for attractive to admissions officers—we present them with a menu that is illusory in its actual range of options. It’s a bit like the 500-channel TV scenario; how much is real choice and how much is just clutter? In the standard view, everyone should play a sport. Everyone should have something brainy, like chess club or debating team, on his or her transcript. And let’s not forget the artsy side of life. Drama club? Marching band?
To be clear, I am not trying to denigrate the intrinsic value of any of these pastimes; if a kid feels a true calling toward chess or trumpet playing or set design, I think that’s great. What I’m criticizing is an educational approach that, because of its built-in inefficiencies and obsession with control, keeps kids so busy, often with activities that have nothing to do with their particular talents or interests, that they have no time to think. There’s a cruel irony in this. Pressured to keep a full plate of purportedly enriching activities, kids end up barely noticing that their interior lives—their uniqueness, curiosity, and creativity—are in fact becoming impoverished.
To hit the point home, in 2001 the dean of admissions at an elite university asked a group of students, “What do you daydream about?” One kid told her, “We don’t daydream. There’s no reward for it, so we don’t do it.”4
In this connection, let’s consider the Plato quote that serves as an epigraph for this book:
The elements of instruction… should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.
Discovering—and nurturing—the natural bent of the child; isn’t this the proper goal of education? And what exactly is meant by this vague phrase “natural bent”? To me, it refers to the particular mix of talents and perspectives that makes each mind unique, and that allows for some minds to be strikingly original. This originality is related to intelligence, but not identical to it. It correlates with differentness and not infrequently with strangeness. Originality is stubborn but not indestructible. You can’t tell it what to do, and if you try too hard to steer it, you either chase it away or murder it.
But can you teach it? Frankly, I doubt this. Yet at the same time I am entirely confident that more creativity would emerge from my imagined school of the very near future. My reasons for believing this are not at all mysterious. More creativity would emerge because it would be allowed to emerge and because there would be time for this to happen.
Let’s think a moment about this deceptively simple issue of time. The conventional school day burns up roughly half of students’ waking hours; conventional homework commandeers another significant chunk. During all this time, kids’ concentration and effort are directed toward achieving entirely predictable results. They’re working the same problems as everybody else, trying to get to the same and only right answer. They’re all writing basically the same essay, memorizing the same names and dates. In other words, they are spending more than half their waking hours being the opposite of creative.
As I hope is clear by now, I’m a big believer that almost anyone can obtain an intuitive understanding of almost any concept if he or she approaches it with a deep understanding of the fundamentals. Students need a firm foundation before anything of consequence can be accomplished. But the simple truth is that building this foundation doesn’t need to eat up half their lives. Using self-paced video lessons, in combination with the computer-based feedback and team-teaching help already described, fundamental coursework can be handled in one or two hours a day. That frees up five or six or seven hours for creative pursuits, both individual and collaborative. That might mean writing poems or computer code, making films or building robots, working with paint or in some weird little corner of physics or math—it being remembered that original math or science or engineering is neither more nor less than art by another name.
If the sheer grinding length of the conventional school day is a brake on creativity, so is the artificial chopping up of time into lessons. Time, after all, is a continuum; like thought itself, it flows. The end of a series of lessons blocks the flow, puts a brick wall in the way. It tells students where they need to stop learning. This is bad enough in cases where a student, say, might like to look a bit more deeply into the causes of the French Revolution; where it’s really deadly, however, is in cases where a student is off on a daring and creative tangent, wrestling with a major project or an idea that is truly novel. That kind of creative work simply can’t be put on a deadline; genius doesn’t punch a time clock! 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.
The schoolhouse I envision would be very different in this regard. Because I would stress the connections and the continuity among concepts, there would be no brick walls between one “subject” and the next. Since learning would be self-paced and self-motivated, there would be no ticking clock telling students when they had to drop a particular line of inquiry. And since the higher goal of our school would be deep, conceptual understanding rather than mere test prep, students would be given the time and latitude to follow their curiosity as far as it would carry them. Thus my belief that creativity would emerge because it would be allowed to emerge.
But there’s a corollary to this that makes a lot of people nervous. If you allow and encourage true creativity, you also have to accept the possibility of failure. A student might pursue an esoteric math topic for a year and never find an answer. A fresh approach to an engineering problem might obsess a student for many months then turn out not to work. A student playwright might never figure out his final act, student poetry might turn out just plain bad. My response to these failures: So what? Think what was learned along the way. Honor the effort and the courage that went into these ambitious and often solitary undertakings. Think about the grand results that might have happened—that can only happen when people pursue big ideas and take big risks. Going back to the very beginning of this book, one of the many things that has made America the most fertile soil for innovation is that it does not stigmatize risk and failure anywhere near as much as the rest of the world. Our schools should be the same—environments for safe experimentation, viewing failure as an opportunity for learning rather than a mark of shame.
Unfortunately, our educational establishment seems to have an abiding fear and hatred of failure, to regard it as a dirty word. In a world of letter grades, a D or an F is a stain; under a system of brittle benchmarks and politically motivated incentives, a “failure” carries a stigma and a penalty. So we lower our standards and water down our expectations in the illusory hope of bringing “success” within the reach of all. But this attitude is both hypocritical and condescending. Not only does it drain the meaning from the true ideal of excellence, but it completely fails to grasp the value of aiming high, even if the result is falling short. Our world needs bold thinking and innovative approaches. Those things are much more likely to be offshoots of big failures than of small, safe, and predictable successes.
Accordingly, the school I envision would be a place where mistakes are allowed, tangents are encouraged, and big thinking is celebrated as a process—whatever the outcome might turn out to be. This is no magic formula to make kids more creative; rather, it’s a way to give light and space and time to the creativity that already exists in each of us—and that, in some mysterious few who will go on to change the world, rises to the level of genius.
So then, I hope I’ve clearly presented at least a basic outline of what my imagined One World Schoolhouse would look like and how it would work. It would be inclusive; it would be affordable. It would help to level the educational playing field both within communities and across national borders.
The school I envision would embrace technology not for its own sake, but as a means to improve deep conceptual understanding, to make quality, relevant education far more portable, and—somewhat counterintuitively—to humanize the classroom. It would raise both the status and the morale of teachers by freeing them from drudgery and allowing them more time to teach, to help. It would give students more independence and control, allowing them to claim true ownership of their educations. By mixing ages and encouraging peer-to-peer tutoring, this schoolhouse would give adolescents the chance to begin to take on adult responsibilities.
The schoolhouse would not be the most hushed of places; it would be more like a hive than a chapel. Students needing quiet could seek out private alcoves. But the bigger space would buzz with games and with collaborations. Self-paced rather than lockstep learning would encourage students to share their most recent discoveries about the workings of the universe. Lessons aimed at thorough mastery of concepts—interrelated concepts—would proceed in harmony with the way our brains are actually wired, and would prepare students to function in a complex world where good enough no longer is.
Yes—a complex world, and an interconnected one. The various outposts of our schoolhouse would therefore be interconnected as well, through things like Skype or Google Hangouts. Students and teachers in San Francisco could interact with those in Toronto, London, or Mumbai. Imagine students in Tehran tutoring students in Tel Aviv or students in Islamabad learning from a professor in New Delhi. Is there really any better way to learn a language or have a global perspective than by regularly interacting with teachers and students around the planet?
In terms of bricks and mortar, the schoolhouse I envision has yet to be built. But the ideas that it is based on have by now been field-tested by millions of online students and tens of thousands more in physical classrooms. The results, whether gathered in anecdotes or measured by hard data, have been extremely gratifying.
For me personally, the biggest discovery has been how hungry students are for real understanding. I sometimes get pushback from people saying, “Well, this is all well and good, but it will only work for motivated students.” And they say it assuming that maybe 20 percent of students fall into that category. I probably would have agreed with them seven years ago, based on what I’d seen in my own experience with the traditional academic model. When I first started making videos, I thought I was making them only for some subset of students who cared—like my cousins or younger versions of myself. What was truly startling was the reception the lessons received from students whom people had given up on, and who were about to give up on themselves. It made me realize that if you give students the opportunity to learn deeply and to see the magic of the universe around them, almost everyone will be motivated.
Teaching methods matter; nuanced feedback and assessment matter. But far more important than any particular set of methods and approaches is the fundamental fact that education has to be continually adapted and improved. The current system is rife with inefficiencies and inequalities, with tragic mismatches between how students are taught and what they need to know; and the situation grows more urgent with every day that the educational status quo survives while the world is changing all around it. This is not an abstract conversation; it’s about the futures of real kids, families, communities, and nations.
Is Khan Academy, along with the intuitions and ideas that underpin it, our best chance to move toward a better educational future? That’s not for me to say. Other people of vision and goodwill have differing approaches, and I fervently hope that all are given a fair trial in the wider world. But new and bold approaches do need to be tried. The one thing we cannot afford to do is to leave things as they are. The cost of inaction is unconscionably high, and it is counted out not in dollars or euros or rupees but in human destinies. Still, as both an engineer and a stubborn optimist, I believe that where there are problems, there are also solutions. If Khan Academy proves to be even part of the solution to our educational malaise, I will feel proud and privileged to have made a contribution.