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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It's not a bad idea in concept, but the core problem is what he delivered was:

"essentially global learning via all the Khan videos, in math, by him, and in other subjects, by his team."

Khan Academy is 2010-era state-of-the-art for rote learning and procedural knowledge. That's a helpful resource, but as one world schoolhouse, there is:

- No room for creativity, or much of anything similar from students (outside of the fantastic JavaScript projects).

- No room for outside innovation.

- A personality cult. Any ideas MUST be attributed to Khan.

Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.

I don't want to tangle myself in a "technically correct" kind of discussion however I'd like to point out that Bloom's taxonomy - a widely used model in pedagogical context - has a level for creative work.

It is the highest level of learning, but still a level of learning.

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