Brilliance

Safa Mahzari
3 min readMar 27, 2018

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Khan Academy’s advantage does not come from providing video lectures for free. The sheer brilliance of Khan Academy comes from teaching to mastery.

As Sal Khan himself says, current education systems make lecture time fixed and the degree of mastery variable. This leads to each student having a different level of understanding once the lesson is finished. Which is odd… Because we are held to the same standards and are expected to progress past this lesson on, say, multiplication, to algebra, exponents, and more.

Khan Academy flips this equation.

By providing free videos online, that can be repeated an infinite number of times, the lecture time becomes variable and the degree of mastery becomes fixed. You may master a concept in 15 minutes, but it may take me a full 90 minutes and a colleague of ours may need half a day.

But, unlike traditional classrooms, in each case, we have the opportunity to reach mastery.

By conventional standards, I did well in university. And that is not because I am inherently smart. I did very poorly in elementary school and middle school. This is not an opinion; this was shown in my test scores, report cards, and lack of interest in what we were learning.

It was normal for me to receive middle-of-the-road grades and “Needs Improvement” in every single class for a given semester. In high school I did… no better.

And it wasn’t until university where I became obsessive about my learning. I told myself, and walked into every class believing, I could get a 100%.

I fell short of that goal, but did whatever I could to learn: I went to office hours each week. I studied every night after class and on weekends. I read upcoming chapters ahead of time. I asked professors to lend me graduate-level textbooks, and I struggled through those pages.

In other words, I created the opportunity to reach mastery. My actions were means on the path towards this end.

This isn’t the narrative that school teaches us. Formal education relies on putting people into neat buckets. Our teachers and classmates are quick to label: A child is gifted or average or “not a math person” based on the results of a single exam.

I refused to believe that. I refused to believe there was a single subject — from continental philosophy and art history to financial statement analysis — that I could not do well in.

And I was fortunate enough to have enough time to dedicate myself to these studies. (I realize many people, particularly those who study later in life, do not have this luxury.)

Ideally, labels like “smart” would be replaced with “worked to understand…” but there is no romance in that. My peers are deflated when they hear that I spend a few hours a day reading books. It’s not as alluring as being a “genius”.

I share this with you not to brag, but to demystify the whole process. People see the results and look for a label to fasten, but they do not see the amount of work needed to get there. They rarely think about the amount of crumpled pages or broken pencils needed to reach a given station in life.

Back to Khan Academy. Their program is brilliant because it confronts the heart of the issue — let’s show you what you know and teach you what you don’t. It lets you achieve mastery across the board, and revisit old topics that may have slipped from your memory.

Khan Academy provides a window into what education can be: Individuals learning at their own pace, getting a shared understanding of the basics, then coming to class and engaging with teachers and students.

We should think about employing more personalization in technology, not less, in order to better serve people at home, at work, and — yes — at school.

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Safa Mahzari
Safa Mahzari

Written by Safa Mahzari

Finance, philosophy, and technology.

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