My first exposure to the Khan Academy was a John Stossel video in which a public school teacher was bragging that her students were actually excelling in math, now that she was no longer boring them with her ed-school-cultivated ignorance. She wasn’t smart enough to leap to the obvious conclusion — what do we need her for? — but presumably the taxpayers can do the math. If not, they can learn how for free on YouTube.
The Khan Academy makes this promise:
With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we’re on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.
It’s fun to watch, in the Stossel video, as children do what they should do, as an expression of their nature as human beings: Revel in the process of learning new skills. But it goes for you, too. If you want to pick up where you left off in the maths, the Khan Academy has what you need. History? Art? The sciences? Dig in. They don’t have foreign languages, but now that this model exists, that can’t be far off. And you can work from any browser anywhere, as well as from your smartphone or tablet computer.
This is what human beings can and should do. Every excuse you can come up with for refusing to improve your mind — money, time, resources — is gone. Your choice now is to step up to the plate in the world-wide agora or get left forevermore behind. How cool is that?
