The Times Magazine 41Schoolhouse accreditation as evidence of
competence. “I think how well you can tutor
or teach a subject is going to be the credential
of the future,” Khan says. “I am already
talking to employers and saying, if I can show
you a young person who’s one of the top
tutors in statistics in the country or the
world, why wouldn’t you hire them as a junior
analyst, Goldman Sachs? Why wouldn’t you
hire them as a junior analyst, McKinsey,
Google? There’s a lot of implications.”
Now Khan is taking his mission to the
next stage with a full-time virtual high school
for students from anywhere on the globe.
The Khan World School, which opens in the
autumn, will offer daily seminars, weekly
Oxford-style tutorials and personalised
online learning based on the Khan Academy
programme. “We’re going to start with 200
students, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t
be 200,000,” Khan says. “It creates a safety
net for anyone. If you go to a broken school,
you’re not bound by your neighbourhood – you
can go to this. The programme is going to feel
like a fancy private school; it’s not going to
feel like an under-resourced school where
you’re one of 40 kids in a classroom.”
Under a collaboration with Arizona State
University (ASU), the school will be free to
pupils in Arizona, but students from other
parts of the US will have to pay $10,000 a year
and international applicants will be charged
$12,000 to cover the costs. Khan says the
school will have one-to-one mentoring and
subject specialists, although pupils will be
trusted to complete assignments from home
and validate their own progress using the
Schoolhouse accreditation system.
“There’s going to be some baseline things
we expect every student to do. We want you
to master math from calculus to statistics.
We want you to master chemistry, physics,
biology, economics. We want you to do writing
assignments. We’ll have a reading list,” he says.
“When we bring people together, it will be
highly interactive. It’s not about, ‘Listen to my
lecture.’ ” Students will be sent materials for
science practicals and samples for dissections.
There will soon be Virtual Reality labs.
Critics might say that the last thing children
need is more online learning, after two years
of school closures. But Khan insists that the
“bubblegum and glue” version of remote
classes that took place during the pandemic
did not take full advantage of the potential of
technology to personalise education. “Online
and remote are two different things. You can
use online tools in the classroom. That can be
very empowering for everyone... Learning is
not bound by time and space; you’re always
stimulated,” he says. “The traditional system
has indoctrinated so many kids just to
passively wait to be told what to do.”
What is more, Khan is convinced that the
top-down approach is contributing to the rise
in mental health problems among the young,
compounded by social media. “I think what
has been characterised as teenage angst is
actually driven by the fact that teenagers are
biologically adults but they are treated like
children,” he explains. “I would argue that even
7-year-olds don’t want to be treated that way,
but if you’re 14, 15 years old and you are told,
‘Sit down. Don’t talk. Don’t ask questions. Do
as I tell you to do. I’m going to give you a
bunch of work to do that really doesn’t matter.
I’m going to grade it, and then we’re going to
throw it away,’ that is hugely disempowering.”
Some claim young people’s attention spans
have gone down but, having witnessed the
curiosity of millions of teenagers around the
world, Khan says, “I think it’s more that their
expectations have gone up. When you and I
were in school, we had two sources: the teacher
and the textbook. Now, students are used to
being able to find out whatever they want.”
This is not a theoretical vision for future
generations. Khan’s own children, who are 13,
10 and 7, are all at the Khan Lab School. The
oldest has already almost finished the entire
calculus course and is working alongside
18-year-olds. “I’m defensive about it. People
say, ‘Oh, Sal’s a tiger dad.’ I’m not. I tell him
he can slow down but he’s into it. His idea of
a good time is talking about maths or coding
with his friends or playing chess. He can crush
me in chess; we’re at about the same basketball
level even though I’m about a foot taller.”
Khan is aware that his children’s upbringing
is very different from his own. “My wife grew
up in eerily similar circumstances, with a
single mother and not a lot of resources. So we
look at our kids’ lives and sometimes we have
a chip on our shoulder. Every weekend, we
do more interesting things than either of us
would do in a year. Going out for dinner wasa big deal for us growing up; it’s not a big deal
for my kids. I don’t hold that against our kids,
but I want them to have a perspective about
what the world is like.”
Having never had his father around when
he was growing up, Khan is also determined
to be as present as possible. Weekends are
sacrosanct and one reason why the Khan Lab
School does not set homework is so pupils can
have dinner with their families every night.
“I really didn’t think about not having a
father until I was 12 or 13 years old,” he says.
“When he died, I didn’t even know how to
process it. But I did hear a lot of stories about
him and his family. My paternal grandfather
was the speaker of the National Assembly of
Pakistan; he was acting prime minister. I would
hear stories about my father being a gold
medallist in Pakistan, one of the top students...
It does create a bit of a narrative of, ‘Oh, I guess
I come from that. Maybe I can do something.’ ”
Education has always been his passion.
“I used to tell my friends when I was working
at the hedge fund, ‘I’m going to work here until
I’m rich enough to start my own school and
be Dumbledore.’ ” Now he thinks he is more
like Professor Xavier in the X-Men movies.
“Whenever he sees these off-the-chart
mutants around the world, he makes them
into X-Men; he brings them to his school and
he trains them to be mutant superheroes. And
we do see that at Khan Academy. There was a
girl in Afghanistan who was forbidden to go to
school and she somehow found Khan Academy.
She taught herself English, she learnt all the
maths and science, she decided she wanted to
be a theoretical physics researcher in the US
and she, essentially, lied to her parents and
smuggled herself into Pakistan to take the SAT
[college admissions test]. She’s now a staff
researcher at Tufts in quantum computing
and she’s published a paper with a Nobel
prizewinner from MIT. There’s an orphan
in Mongolia who got hooked on to Khan
Academy; she’s now the No 1 creator of content
in her country. There was a guy who was in
jail for 18 years. He was on Khan Academy so
much he got to Stanford University. These are
the Professor Xavier stories.”
Khan still can’t quite believe that the
amateurish tutoring programme he started for
his cousins almost 20 years ago has turned
into a global phenomenon. But like many
entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, he is a dreamer
with big ideas. “I would like to think that, even
though I don’t fly around with my own private
jet or my own rocket, some of the things that
I hope to do with the Khan Academy and the
Khan World School are on a fairly grandiose
scale,” he says. “They are on a scale that
I believe would rival trying to explore Mars.” nRachel Sylvester is chair of The Times
Education Commission‘THERE WAS A GUY WHO WAS
IN JAIL FOR 18 YEARS. HE WAS
ON KHAN ACADEMY SO MUCH
HE GOT TO STANFORD’
With his wife, Umaima, in 2015