40 The Times Magazineal Khan was in his twenties and
working as a hedge-fund analyst in
Boston when his 12-year-old cousin
Nadia from New Orleans asked him
for some help with maths. She was
struggling, and had been put into
a lower set, so he started tutoring
her over the telephone. She went
from the remedial class to being
the top maths student in the school.
Soon Khan was giving remote lessons about
algebra and calculus to 15 cousins in Louisiana.
To make life easier, he set up a website and
wrote some software that would generate
practice questions. A friend suggested that
he could record videos too and put them on
YouTube. “I thought, ‘Horrible idea. That’s for
cats playing piano and dogs on skateboards,’ ”
he admits. “But I took a shot at it anyway.
My cousins told me they liked me better on
YouTube than in person because they could
watch a repeat and there was no judgment.”
Slowly, Khan’s simple explanations of
difficult maths concepts began to be noticed
by people outside the family. By 2008 – four
years after he had begun teaching Nadia- tens of thousands of people were watching
his online tutorials every month. Then one
day Bill Gates told a conference that he had
been using Khan’s videos to teach his children
maths and the lessons went viral. Before
long, Google was offering Khan $2 million
to expand his dream of a “free world-class
education for anyone, anywhere”.
I meet the world’s most famous maths
teacher at his Californian headquarters in
a former Google office block in Mountain
View. The Khan Academy now has more than
135 million registered users in 190 countries
and operates in 51 languages. It offers
thousands of free video tutorials and exercises
to anybody with an internet connection. At
the start of the pandemic, when schools closed
around the world, the number of minutes
spent learning on the website tripled almost
overnight from 30 million to 85 million a day.
Khan is a Silicon Valley superstar, a
disrupter who applied the old Facebook slogan,
“Move fast and break things”, to education.
Some of the richest people in the world
have poured millions into the not-for-profit
company he set up from a “closet” in his home
with a cheap laptop and bargain microphone.
His backers include Eric Schmidt, Elon
Musk and Carlos Slim as well as Gates, who
describes him as a “true pioneer” and says his
impact on education might be “incalculable”.
But Khan, 45, lives modestly with his wife,
Umaima, a doctor, and their three children in
a four-bedroom suburban house. There are
“two Hondas in the drive” rather than a Tesla
or a Ferrari, and he doesn’t have a private
jet or a personal chef. “My net wealth.” he
says, “is not in the billions by any stretch
of the imagination, or even the tens of millions.”
He grew up in poverty in Metairie,
Louisiana, the son of an Indian-born single
mother who worked on the till in a series of
convenience stores to feed her family. His
father, a doctor who had come to the US from
Bangladesh to go to medical school, left when
he was a baby, suffering from depression. Khan
only met him once at 13, and then he died the
following year. “Growing up, I was living in two
different worlds. At school, my friends were
mainly white; most of them had single mothers.
I felt like it was mainstream. But in the South
Asian community it was abnormal to have
divorced parents and not to know your father.
We were below the poverty line for most of my
childhood. We didn’t have health insurance
and we spent a lot of time at the discount
store. I saw the other Indian and Bangladeshi
kids in New Orleans, whose families were
professionals, and I thought, ‘I want that.’”
Mathematics gave him the way to achieve
his ambition. Khan became the first from his
school to get into the prestigious Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, before going on to
take an MBA from Harvard Business School.
“What I love about maths is that it’s the
purest essence of the universe,” he says. “With
almost anything else you can say – the colour
red is what you perceive it to be, time and
space is just a simulation of your mind. But
there’s something about maths that can
transcend that. Coming from it there are
ideas that frankly just blow your mind.”The Khan Lab School, the physical campus
founded by Khan in 2014 to trial a radical new
approach to education, is on the ground floor
of his headquarters. I pop into a data science
lesson, where students are sitting at a long
conference table analysing voter behaviour at
the last US presidential election. The room is
buzzing with chatter as the teenagers throw
around ideas about the pattern on the scatter
graph. It’s unlike any other classroom I have
been in. The teaching assistants are pupils, the
class is mixed age (ranging from 14 to 18) and
everyone is on a laptop.
At this deliberately experimental private
school, where fees are over $30,000 a year and
the students include the children of Google
executives and dotcom millionaires, there are
no grades or homework. Pupils move at their
own pace, following an individual programme
of online Khan Academy lessons, supported
by teachers when they need it. Under Khan’s
“mastery” approach, they must demonstrate
they have understood each topic before moving
on. The brightest can race through so they end
up taking university courses, but there is no
stigma in taking longer to master a subject.
Learning from failure is encouraged, with
creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurialism.
Several students have already set up their ownbusinesses. These pupils, and their parents, are
wealthy enough to be able to afford to take a
risk in joining this ground-breaking, untested
school – but it seems to have paid off. The first
cohort graduated last year with flying colours
and went on to top universities.
Upstairs, the Khan Academy office is
almost empty – most people are still working
from home, which is clearly more acceptable
in Silicon Valley than in Whitehall. Khan, an
engaging enthusiast in a neatly pressed red
polo shirt, does not look like a tech titan. But
like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs he is
an idealist with far-reaching ambitions. His
aim, he tells me, is to create a whole new
model of education, which uses technology
to personalise learning just as Netflix has
transformed the way we watch television and
Amazon has changed the way we shop. The
traditional classroom model, in which all
pupils study the same thing at the same time,
“simply doesn’t fit our changing needs”, he
argues. “It’s a fundamentally passive way of
learning, while the world requires more and
more active processing of information.”
It sounds utopian, but the Khan Academy
is just the start of his plan to reshape learning.
During the pandemic he set up a free peer-to-
peer tutoring platform through which students
as young as 13 can become accredited to teach
courses to other pupils anywhere in the world.
So far, 1,000 tutors and 10,000 learners have
signed up to Schoolhouse.world and there are
heart-warming stories of collaboration – like
14-year-old Sachin from Fremont, California,
who helped 52-year-old Cal, from Ebenezer,
Mississippi, get his high-school diploma. He
had previously dropped out of school at the
same age as Sachin.
With questions being raised about the
future of exams in the US as in the UK,
universities have started to recognise theS
Khan teaching at the Khan
Lab School in Mountain ViewKHAN ACADEMY, GETTY IMAGES
Sal Khan Continued from page 29