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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't.

Fact is, Khan's videos are considered good because the actual history education that most students take away from classrooms is even worse. Like most other subjects, that's what you get when you try to deliver a comprehensive, objective, detail-oriented education to students who (within a small margin of error) couldn't give a shit. Never mind the Bolsheviks or the timeline -- what percentage of randomly sampled American high school graduates would even know that there was a Russian Revolution if you asked them?

If we can replace zero history with a fifteen-minute-chunk version of history, I'm for it.

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it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't.

Yes, that's what I was thinking. The stuff the author quotes sounds bad, but probably better than you'd get from some teachers I had.

Plus on the Internet kids can watch these videos at any age. His simplified version of history could be way better than what e.g. an 8 year old might otherwise have access to.

In this case, it doesn't matter that Khan is displacing worse things. These videos are still a disservice to their viewers.

Better for people to know that they don't understand history, then to wrongly think they do know it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

>A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

For a pilot of a Boeing 747, yes, it is. For an eight year old learning history, a little knowledge is probably the very best first-step on the path to a lot of knowledge.

In the site's current form, I think the fact that a viewer of any age can watch a history video is actually a bit problematic.

For mathematics, all of the material is broken down into the very basic components, so it's easy for a video to have a set of prerequisites which any viewer should understand before watching (with a set of links to the videos corresponding to those prerequisites).

For a subject like history, the material can't easily be broken down. As the article points out, a statement like "as you can imagine, Japan did not produce a lot of its own oil" may be common sense to someone of high-school age, but an 8-year old may have no understanding of how oil is produced or where it comes for and the statement may make no sense. This doesn't render KA as dangerous or useless, just points out a problem which needs to be solved and which they are certainly aware of :).

To me, that a viewer of any age can watch is practically the whole point of Khan Academy. Kids learn at different speeds and are interested in different subjects at different ages. Whatever subject you're talking about, there are some 8-year-olds who could benefit from it. The traditional approach of having grownups decide what material is suitable for what age is guaranteed to produce a mixture of kids who are bored and kids who are lost; khan materials present the promise that kids might be able to learn at their own pace and according to their own interests. The ones who find history of X fascinating will race ahead and do related research and file info away for later; the ones who lack context will probably be bored and lose interest and want to study something else and that's okay.

Agreed. Watching Carl Sagan´s Cosmos at age 9 was fascinating, even though a second viewing, years later, was much more informative.

His simplified version of history could be way better than what e.g. an 8 year old might otherwise have access to.

I've had four different eight-year-olds in my household, while living in two different countries, over the years, and any eight-year-old who is literate can find better information about history than what's in the current Khan Academy videos in any country where there is a public lending library. There is the issue, of course, of some students not having access to libraries, but there is also the issue of some students not having access to the Internet. In the best case, Salman Khan will implement his plan of having subject matter experts who have specialized knowledge of various topics (gained, in part, from their years of using libraries assiduously) produce a broader array of Khan Academy videos, and curious eight-year-olds will go beyond both Khan Academy and their school lessons by seeking out other sources of information on a variety of subjects. That's what I encourage my four children to do. Khan Academy is one of a huge variety of sources we use in homeschooling. In my day, as a pupil in a typical public school, I avidly supplemented my school lessons by reading library books. If Khan Academy is part of encouraging more young learners to be more curious and to seek out a greater variety of sources for their learning, more power to it.

The author is right about how dangerous it is for students to only learn from one source though. However, how is this different someone who gets all their news from Fox? Each person has their internal bias, and will learn from their chosen source. Existing education system, ranging from school texts right down to the career path is dictated by academia. I can't see a better alternative other than simple freedom for people to chose who they wish to learn from, and how they wish to lead their lives.

>The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't.

Are there no libraries? I believe that if you are truly self motivated enough to learn US history on your own (which is what the Khan academy is supposed to do), you'd be better off actually looking up a syllabus online and reading about the topics yourself.

A 15 minute summary of US history between World War II and Vietnam can only create the illusion of understanding, which I would argue is indeed worse than zero history (a factoid I find highly debatable).

+1 for libraries. It's funny that on HN, where people constantly insist that text is a faster way to convey information, opening a history book is not even considered.

To me, it goes back to the goal of the Khan academy: is this meant for pop culture consumption, or more in-depth knowledge?

How does reading the diary of Ann Frank compare to Khan's video?

There's a lot to be said for learning something in multiple passes. A fifteen-minute overview video can give a vague notion of what happened when, and lay the ground work for more detail later -- as well as, perhaps, piquing a student's interest. There aren't that many students who will voluntarily go read through a history book. There are considerably more who will watch a 15-minute history overview video, which may make them more likely to study more history later.

So, watch a video, read a book, read a bunch of books. None of this stuff is mutually exclusive. Rather, I would say its complementary.

The problem is that you think someone who watches this video would then "know there was a Russian Revolution." No, they wouldn't--at least not in any strong sense of the term "know". All they would have is some phonetic sequence that they could repeat.

At that point, it's just a game of 'guess the password'. http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/

I don't think the students who miss out of high school history are the ones watching this video.

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