Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling

My belief is that Khan Academy is tremendously useful when started at a young age and done consistently. I have been doing it for over 7 years and it was a huge portion of my childhood. Long term, consistent use of KA from a young age builds deep procedural fluency and (this is very IMPORTANT:) self-directed discipline that transform how a student handles complex concepts. Even though some critics correctly note and argue that automated drill and practice cannot replace creative, project based discovery and learning, daily mastery based practice eliminates foundational learning gaps (you get a solid understanding), lowers the anxiety around making mistakes (because you get used to repetitive practice), and automates core mechanics (it becomes a basic skill) until they become second nature. I believe that persistent procedural learning is very far from mechanizing education at the expense of real learning. Rather, it frees up valuable cognitive bandwidth and gives the precise structural confidence and fluency required to excel in open ended, high level problem solving that so many critics preach. This is my opinion as someone who did Khan Academy for 7 years (where I learned the procedural step by step learning and practice) and went to school at the same time (where I did the open ended problems and projects). I believe that Khan Academy will help millions of students learn and grow (and the computer programming community is great too!).

A couple of days ago it was Ghandi instead of Gandhi. I understand it's not a big deal. But it's also not a big deal to get the spelling right.

There are only two comments with that spelling. It's not a big deal.

Considering that WoW came out in 2004 and people STILL sometimes call Rogues "rouges"... doubt it.

This is just the comment section of HN, does the spelling really matter as long as the reader gets it?

Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.

I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).

He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.

Khan Academy is a treasure, and is how I re-learned math in my 20s after not taking it seriously in school. Then moved on to MitX for science [re]fam.

I am having my kids learn math with Kahn academy if we don't have anything better by that point.

Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos.

"Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..."

Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.

The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.

You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.

I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.

To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.

My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.

The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.

This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.

The idea is for the students to watch the videos outside of class and this frees up time for the teachers to provide individual help.

I agree with you. It's just an attention bite as nobody would care about this article if it wasn't focused on something as big and popular as Khan Academy. It's clear that the author has never used it as a place to learn something.

Yeah the article feels as though its describing Khan Academy from 10 or more years ago - it is quite odd.

"What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn, what motivates them, what makes the difference between someone who pushes through difficulty and someone who types “IDK.”"

It is almost as though the author thinks that Khan Academy is an organization of 1, and that they don't employ learning scientists and have a content team and don't publish research papers in the learning science field.

You are wrong in understanding the article.

Khan: Videos + rote exercises

Learning: Projects, complex problem-solving, exploration, argumentation, etc.

Dewey is worth reading.

Sounds like you should read the article if you have questions about what the article is about?

I agree that it is unfair and perhaps even unnecessary to focus solely on Khan here. But I think it must be acknowledged he has caused (intentionally or not) a ton of damage to the state of education. He sparked a movement of “innovation” and “disruption” that managed to push a lot of unproven teaching methods that ran against standard pedagogy which made a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of money.

I don‘t think Khan is solely to blame for this. These entrepreneurs would probably have done equal amount of damage without Khan, siphoning funds away from proven solutions like paying teachers and providing school lunches, and into ballooning administration costs and 3rd-party tech companies. However Khan is for better or for worse the face of this movement and will justly or unjustly get that blame.

Duolingo is however less ambiguous. There is very little language learning going on on their platform. You trick people into playing their stupid game and watching their stupid ads, thinking that they are learning, when in fact they are not.

I am responding to the comment, not the article.

The concept of Khanmigo was great. The implementation was basically useless.

It was a great attempt, but the article explains the problem:

"early OpenAI access"

This was literally the world's very first attempt at an agentic tutor, with (initially pre-release) GPT-4. That is worlds away from what's being built with fable or sol-grade models in 2026, or what will be available in 2028.

I can't speak for anything that came later, but in the early videos the majority of the benefit was that the presentation was exceptionally clear, and focused on developing one little piece of a subject at a time, it gently paste format that you could easily pause and rewind over and over.

It was never about replacing exercises, it was there to help you do the exercises from your actual coursework, and to serve as a refresher reference for things you might have already studied but forgot some details about.

Also the videos usually consisted of a while of time spent physically writing out and talking through examples.