Basic Education is Solvable

in order to empower millions of people to thrive. Salman Khan's Khan Academy reaches one hundred million people a year all over the world, where remote students are able to watch online videos that cover a wide variety of subjects from mats and English to computer animation and art history. They and sal agree that students results are better than

those of their peers. The can Academy focuses on what sal calls mastery education, so you move through the courses online at your own pace, only going on to the next step when you've got it one hundred percent. Sala's talking to Ammad Ali Atbar about new ways to address education so that everyone can develop the skills needed to

navigate a future of AI and automation. Education systems have transformed wildly since the earliest universal primary education system was established in Prussia in seventeen seventeen, when I was only a child. Many countries followed suit in the twentieth century, and later India past laws introducing universal, free, and compulsory education in two thousand and nine. Some countries still don't have laws making education mandatory. It's really extraordinary to look

at literacy rates over time. The trend is hugely positive. Take literacy rates among young people and we say that's people aged between fifteen to twenty four, so sorry, all of you twenty five year olds year old. Globally, the youth literacy rate increased to ninety one percent over two decades, with the number of young people who can't read or write dramatically decreasing. But of course it's not all good news. Regional and gender disparities persist. Literacy is lowest in least

developed countries and higher among males than females. So a lot done and more to do. A good question to ask is whether or not our education systems developed in response to the Industrial Revolution are still fit for this technological revolution. Add to that that even the brightest pupils are left with gaps in their knowledge as they've moved through the system according to their age, not really according to what they've learned. And that's true even in countries

of the best education system. So what hope is there for people where even traditional schooling is still out of reach? In a global economy defined by artificial intelligence and robotics, people would need much more than literacy and numerousy Can we leverage technology to amplify human purpose and potential? Sal believes that we can, and his organization, the Khan Academy, shows that actually a world class education better than the one in class can be made available for free to

everyone in the world. No really, and they have this really great origin story which I love. I think you will too. Okay, let's take a listen. I'll give you a thought experiment. If we were to go back in time five hundred years, a thousand years, pick a place on the planet even you know, even then five hundred years ago, Western Europe was actually one of the more

literate parts of the planet. You would have seen about twenty percent of men and about ten percent of women were literate, and I suspect that if you went to someone who was literate and you said, what percentage of the population you think is even capable of reading if you had a perfect education system, they might have said, well, you know, maybe maybe thirty forty percent with a great

education system. And if you said, well, I think that that beggar on the side of the street could learn to read and learn to write, and could learn to do mathematics as good as anyone in the king's court, they would have thought that you were absolutely delusional. But you fast forward five hundred years, we know that their prediction was the one that was widely pessimistic, that pretty close to one hundred percent of the population is capable of reading or doing or being numerous, or being able

to write and communicate. But if I were to ask people today a similar thought experiment, what percentage of the population is capable of being a cancer researcher. What percentage of the population is capable of being an entrepreneur, of writing the next great novel, of pushing the frontiers of physics, I think a lot of very smart and even well intentioned people will say, well, today that's maybe one to five percent, maybe with the great education system it is

ten fifteen percent. But what if that's a similar blinders on the blinders of just a system that we've been in, this kind of Industrial Revolution system that pushed everyone together in this factory model. If someone didn't understand something, that's okay. Because in the Industrial Revolution we had a triangular labor pyramid and you only needed so many people who could do the knowledge skills or be a member of the creative class. This would have been a nice to have.

I think, if we're talking thirty years ago, wouldn't it be nice if more people could operate at the top of the pyramid in the knowledge economy? But I think this is a societal imperative. I think I think the very structure of our society is now dependent on us as a civilization making a bet in this direction. Artificial intelligence, automation, they're going to redefine what humans need to do anymore. And there's a very optimistic sense, but there's some real questions.

What's going to happen to those truck drivers once we have self driving cars, what's going to happen to those cashier workers once we have automated cashiers? And those are just the most obvious places. It's likely to hit every part of what we now define as human work and purpose. And I think there's some folks, I would call them techno optimists who point at the Industrial Revolution and say, well, the Industrial Revolution people had those same fears. Weavers were

afraid of kind of the weaving machines. Horses obviously lost their jobs as cars came about. But net net, you had job creation. And what I point to those folks, and I'm actually surprised how little it is of the conversation the Industrial Revolution. Net job creation did not happen in a vacuum. It wasn't just say, hey, technology, it's a little scary, but it always creates jobs. It coincided with what I would argue as the largest societal bet that we made in many hundreds of years, maybe ever,

and that was the notion of freemass public education. I believe that's what allowed us to navigate the Industrial Revolution in a way that built a middle class, that allowed most people to participate. But now we're in a I would say even a faster revolution. Some people call it the Third Industrial Revolution, but whatever you want, to call it, the AI automation Revolution. And I don't think we can be complacent there. We need to make a similar type

of beat on human potential. So in my mind, the only option we have is let's use these tools in conjunction with amazing educators, amazing systems to create a world where the truck driver of today could be the cancer researcher of tomorrow. Let me just stop you here for a second, because I think it's worth grappling with how you came to this conclusion of education and your platform is a place in which we can deal with the

automation problem. Well, from the early stages of kN Academy, if you go back ten, twelve, thirteen years ago, back then people weren't talking a lot about self driving cars or the coming AI revolution, And so when I set up kN Academy, it wasn't with that end. It was really like, Hey, how can we give more people opportunity? How can we give young girls and parts of the planet that they don't have access to world class education?

How can we give an African American student an inner city school, a majority of which don't even offer things like calculus or physics. How do we make sure that they have access to those types of materials? And that it's at a world class level even where when they

do have access. So that's where we started. But then over the last I would say about ten years, as the public conversation I think rightfully started to say, hey, well, what does it mean for society If you know, right now we have five or ten million, mostly men, who are drivers, whether it's an uber or lift driver, or whether it's a truck driver. What's going to happen to them when it seems like we're going to have self driving cars in the next decade. What's what when you

have five million people work in retail? What does it mean when you have fully automated stores. Kind Academy helps millions of people every year learn economics and world history. And I remember making a lot of these videos on whether it's the Industrial Revolution or these major inflection points in history, from agriculture to the advent of writing to the printing press, and I'm like, we are at one

of those inflection points. And every one of those other inflection points either helped catalyze human potential, a step change in human potential, or that the tools of that inflection point were used to address the disruptions of the inflection point, and so I said, why how come people are not

thinking in those terms today? In my mind, if you don't view it as an education issue, you're resolving to just have your fingers crossed that we don't get into kind of some tech feudal system where a small percentage of the population who does have the right skills are able to benefit from all of the returns from the robots, and that everyone else is on some type of social safety net. That is a dystopian society. And I think if we don't figure out a way to up level

a lot of people, that's where we're heading. Can you just tell us how you started Han Academy. Yeah, if you rewind back to two thousand and four, I was a year out of business school. My background was originally in technology and software and in math, but now I had found myself. I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I had just gotten married in the Northeast, and I had family visiting me from New Orleans, which is

where I was born and raised. And it just came out a conversation with my aunt that heard Nadia, who was twelve years old at the time, was having trouble in math and because of that she was being placed into a slower math class. So I offered to tutor her when she went back to New Orleans. And so she goes back to New Orleans every day after school for her after work for me, we get on the phone, we use instant messenger, whatever we could off the internet,

and I start tutoring her one thing after another. She slowly gets caught up with her class. She understands unit conversion. I called up her school and I say, you know, I really think Nadia Orman should should really be able to take that placement exam from last year. And they said who are you and I said, I'm her cousin, and they actually led her and that same Nadia that was being placed into that remedial math class only after about two months of tutoring was able to be put

into an advanced math class. And so I was hooked. I started tutoring her younger brothers, and then over the next two years or so, word gets around my family that free tutoring is going on, and I find myself every day after work with ten fifteen cousins, family friends all around the country being their their tutor. And the first con Academy a lot of folks associated with videos,

but it had nothing to do with videos. I saw that a lot of my cousins were having trouble, not because the subject matter was hard or not because they weren't bright. It's because they had gaps. And I wanted them to be able to practice and remediate and fill in those gaps. And so I started writing software for them so that they could get as much practice as they need and get feedback on what they got wrong

or right. I started making tools so that I, is their tutor, could see what they were up to, and I could assign things. And I just put it on a website, and I needed to get a domain name, and the only one I could find was con Academy. And it was a little bit of a joke, but but I liked the way it sounded it, you know, it made it sound like it was more than a

family tutoring project. And in the back of my mind, I did I did start to dream that, hey, now that I'm writing software, software can scale to a lot of folks. And I saw that it was helping my family. And I was showing off this software to a friend at a dinner party in November two thousand and six, and his name's Zulfakar runs on I have to give him full credit. And he said, well, this is all cool, sal but how are you scaling up your actual lessons?

And I said, you know, Zuli, it's hard to do with fifteen cousins what I was originally just doing what Nadia or Nadia and her brothers. And he says, well, I have an idea. You could record them as videos and upload them onto YouTube for your family. And my initial reaction was, no, that's a horrible idea. YouTube is YouTube is for cats playing piano, it's not for serious mathematics. But I went home that that weekend, I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea, and I gave

it a shot. And you know those videos they were. If you look at some of those early videos that I uploaded in November of two thousand and six, they say things like welcome to Level three equations, because Level three Equations was a little software module that I had created for my cousins. But they happen to be public,

happened to be on YouTube. Soon became clear that people who are not my cousins were watching, and the viewcount started to grow, exponentially and comments started to come in, some of them pretty you know, just nice, like thank you, this really helped. But a lot of folks saying that this was the tutor that their family can't afford, that this was the way that the only way they're able to keep up with class. People in the military saying that they're able to go back to college or study

while they're being deployed. So it really started to dawn on me that wow, even at this early phase between the software and now the lessons that were on video, this could one day And it was me, you know, operating in a walk in closet at the time, so it was delusional, but maybe this could one day reach millions or tens of millions or billions of people. And so that's when it started to get in my mind that this could, this could be more than just a

family project. So I give us some of the numbers there, what is the scale of han Academy's work right now? Well, as of you know, the last numbers I saw, we have about seventy two million registered users. Seventeen million students of all ages from around the world come every month

to use the platform. About two million of those are predominantly classroom users who are using US with a teacher and are using us for several hours a week, and that's associated with efficacy claims where they're able to grow twenty thirty percent faster than their peers or they might otherwise have. And it's being used in almost every country in the world. So in some of those cases, it's

reaching more than just the user that's sitting there. It's going to a group of folks trying to learn together. So the impact even it seems to reach beyond even those numbers, Is that correct. Yeah, a lot of people think of kin academy, or you might do a web search looking for a photosynthesis and you stumble on kN academy and you either watch a video and then we now have practice and you can get feedback and keep

learning if you like. So there's a lot of what we call independent learners, but increasingly, in fact roughly a majority of our usage is from what we would call

teacher directed users. These are where the teacher is making con Academy an integral part of the classroom, and the teacher is using a much more sophisticate version of the tools that I started making for myself as my cousin's tutor, where they can keep track of where the student saw, where students might need to be unblocked, where they might be able to do a focused intervention. Tell us some stories of people who have used han Academy and materials

to move towards educational success. I remember in the early days, there was a mother that emailed me and I brought my wife over because it was such a moving story of her son's. Two sons had a learning disability, and according to this mother, kN Academy was the only way that her sons could keep up with their class. And she said because of that, her and her entire family were praying for me and my entire family, and you had to imagine, I mean, that would be powerful on

any level. But you have to remember my day job. I was an analyst at a hedge fund. I was not used to people praying for me, so that was or at least in that way, you know. I used to give talks and interviews like this and talk about maybe one day it'll be used, you know, in Mongolia, just imagining the furthest remotest place on the planet. And a few months after that, I got a note from Mongolia and as an email with a YouTube link. I

click on the YouTube link. It was this young girl named Zia, she was sixteen at the time, from Mongolia, and she talks about how she really enjoys Khan Academy. It's really helped her and her friends like it and things like that, and I thought it was cool someone in Mongolia is using Khan Academy. I immediately assumed that she must be middle class or upper middle class. She clearly had access to the Internet and a computer. Her

English was actually quite good. And then I read the text of her email more closely, and it turns out that there was a group of engineers who worked at Cisco Systems who were using their vacation time to go to Mongolia and set up computer labs and orphanages, and Zia was one of those orphans. And so that kind of it just blew my mind. It's like, wow, this is like something I would only have expected to read

in like a science fiction book. And what's even cooler is that Zia, a few years after that, after she graduated from high school, became one of the top contributors to Kin Academy in the Mongolian language. So It's this meta story of if you just let people tap into their potential a little bit, they themselves can become amplifiers, especially for their own people. You know. Another analogous story

a couple of years ago, it's about, yeah, eighteen months ago. Now, I got an email from actually this girl the University of Iowa who said, you have got to know about this girl in Afghanistan. And I'm like, well, what's going on? And she's like and she told me the story of this this young woman named Sultana. At the age of twelve, the Taliban take over her town in Afghanistan, forbid all the young girls from going to school, threatened them with

horrible things, you know, acid attacks, etcetera, etce. And so she doesn't go to school. So she's doing like ten hours of chores a day, taking you know, cleaning, cooking, etc. Etc.

And her brother in law sees that she's really curious and really wants to learn, and it's like almost like the biggest blow to her that she can't go to school, and so he got her a computer with internet connection, and so she uses that, starting at age twelve, to first try to learn English because most of the Internet is still in English, and she actually got ahold of a Time magazine in English because she was trying to get as much material to read in English, and it

happened had an article on Kon Academy in it, and so she says, this is what I need. So every waking hour when she's not doing chores, she was on kon Academy and she goes from she was actually at what we would consider a late elementary school level, and especially in math and science, all the way through middle school, high school, even more advanced topics, you know, she says.

You know, her big aha was the moment that she realized that she was two grade levels ahead of her older brothers who who are still allowed to go to school. And by you know, late high school, she's doing calculus and physics and chemistry and biology and she wants to become a physicist. She's so passionate about it now and she wants to study in the US and do physics research. And this is when she meets this young woman from Iowa through some type of an online language instruction program

and she learns about the SAT. Sultana smuggles herself into Pakistan to take the SAT because it's not an offered enough guys yet. So if you have any family members who are grumbling about going on a Saturday morning to take the SAT, tell them sultana story. There are people who are willing to do. She lied to her parents to go to Karachi to take the SAT, and she does shockingly well for someone who has self taught in English and learned everything she knew kind of on her own.

And that's the point at which why I was why they were able to get my email address, and we're all now trying to say, how do we get Sultana to come to this country. She got into a few universities out here, but if you're a foreign student, it's pretty you know, before you even get a student visa, you have to show that you have a one hundred thousand dollars in the bank, etcetera. She did not have

one hundred thousand dollars in the bank. No, we're close to it, and so we kept trying to call people, etcetera. Et Luckily, Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times caught wind. I actually don't know how, and he wrote an op ed out her titled Meet Sultana, the Taliban's Worst fear and if people do a Google search, they can find it, and that talks about Sultana's story. And after that, she was able to get a humanitarian visa, and so she's now in the country and and and studying, and she's

actually already collaborating with some Nobel Prize winning physicists. And the only reason why you're actually not hearing more about Sultana is her family is still in that town and that's why I'm not mentioning the town. And it's actually a security risk. So she's she's actually still a little bit under the radar. We've kind of gotten into this

with these two stories. But what are some of the challenges around the language difference, the existing literacy that some of your potential learners, the challenges that they might have. How are you grappling with that? Yeah, so our missions free world class education for anyone anywhere. So we need to be able to reach everyone everywhere world with world class education. And so already part of that is kind of academy. There's thirty six projects around the world. These

are volunteers. There's actually been over fourteen thousand volunteers who have helped translate redo subtitle videos that's where, you know, whether it's India, Mongolia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Sweden. I mean I could, I could keep listening listening. These areas are most focused. Efforts have actually been in Latin America and India, both Spanish speaking Latin America and Portuguese speaking, you know, in Brazil, that's where we have the most focus efforts.

But if we're talking generally access, you know, to use con Academy, you need to use it properly. You need a computer and you need the Internet, and we know that not everyone on the planet today has that. Now, the trends are very good, if even relative to when kN Academy was just getting started. Over the last ten twelve years, things have dramatically improved there about a year and a half ago. In places like India, broadband rates

have gone really low. People are able to access system on their cell phones, but we do have stop gap measures. There's organizations that are created offline versions of con Academy called ka Light. There's folks who've taken just the videos, even though that's just a piece of what we do,

and they put it on DVDs. You know, places like India, everyone watches Bollywood, so they all have you know, the places that might not have electricity, but they have a generator and a DVD player and so, um, we're we're we're able, We're able to reach that way. But you know, we're we're not going to be the ones. We're a

small organization, a small nonprofit that's philanthropically funded. We're not the ones that are going to be able to put up the satellites and build out the telecom infrastructure, but we can be the ones that make it very clear to government officials that it's important they do that. But I'm really excited. You know, Elon Musk is putting up his constellation of satellites out that should give global Internet access to you know, the remotest parts of the most

remote parts of the planet, and we're gonna be right there. Um. And as he does that, Um, there's no reason why anyone on the planet shouldn't be able to access Cohn Academy. And then the question is are they going to be able to access it in a way that's um, you know, they can understand it. And so that's where we are working with, whether it's volunteers, corporations, ministries of education to not only localize the content, but to map it to

local standards, and localization is an interesting challenge. Sometimes it goes quite well. Oftentimes we're redoing, but you know, you do realize that, you know, the math oftentimes is much easier. Once you go into the humanities, that becomes a much more sensitive issue. And that's why we're we're we're leading with with with math because that's less sensitive in math and science and so. But but I'm excited about it. You know, the US, Latin America and to some degree

India or where we're most developed. But you know, in the long run, we've got to be able to reach the whole planet. You know, you mentioned people using YouTube and Google a lot, but in a lot of countries there are periods of time where YouTube will be taken off public internet access for for years at a time, like in Pakistan. Um. So what are the other ways that you have you know, subverted some of some of those government censorship possibilities that would prevent people from accessing

hon Academy materials. Yeah, you know, it's interesting things like YouTube. It's not just governments that sometimes sends to them, even school districts in the US of course, so we've had to do workarounds there so when when people, you know,

we use people. Some people discover us through YouTube or use some of our content through YouTube, but um, the main way to use con Academy if you go to con academy site, our default hosting for our our videos is through YouTube, but if YouTube isn't accessible, we do host it other places like Amazon Web Services and places like China. We have other folks who've mirror mirrored a

lot of the content. So we're constantly thinking of ways to get in front of students and make it as accessible as possible, whether it's the internet access, the technology access, you know, where we've put a lot of investment in being able to do things on mobile, obviously, the localization, not being dependent on a Google or YouTube and being able to be you know obviously, con academy dot org is where we want people ago if they want to

go ast us in Spanish ees dot con academy dot org. Interestingly, in Mexico, the Carlos Slim Foundation has worked with tell Cell, which is Carlo Slim's telecom company, to zero rate kN Academy. So if you're a student in in Mexico and you want to use ees dot com Academy dot org, which is the Spanish version of khn Academy. It does not even hit your cell plan, so you just see a low cost device phone and you could be anywhere and you could be streaming videos et et no cost to you.

All right, So we just want to end with the biggest vision of Khan Academy for the future for you, What is your most concrete ambition for the future of Khan Academy. You know my ambition for Khan Academy, and it was delusional when I was a guy operating in a closet talking to a computer a lot, that we really can become an institution for the planet that is really serving you know, we're we're already serving over one hundred million folks every year in some way, shape or form.

There's no reason why within ten years that can't be a billion folks every year or several billions of folks every year, and that they could use this at deeper and deeper levels, whether they just need a little bit of help, have that free tutor that they couldn't otherwise afford, whether it's having access to course materials in a personalized way that would have. You know, before kN academy have been you know, just a dream that would have seemed inaccessible.

But it's not just the learning. It's not just the access. It's not just the being able to do it in a way that's personalized for the student. I hope in the next five years you're going to be hearing from us about ways to connect that learning and that competency that you've developed on kN Academy to real economic opportunity, so that might be an internship, that might be college credit, that might be a job, and that we stay with you.

A lot of corporations are talking to us globally about hey, but you know, education shouldn't end once you've graduated, so to speak, whether it's high school or college or graduate school. It should continue. And we want to figure out how, let's say, our bank tellers can keep reskilling so they can come to managers, and they can keep reskilling so they become accountants or regional managers or executives, etc. Etc. Or or go into other functions. And that's happening in

almost every industry. The one thing we know about the future is we the pace of change is going to happen faster and faster and faster in the model of just having a sixteen years of education or twelve years of education and then just relying on that until you

get to retirement. That's those days are over. And I think we are almost uniquely suited or needed to ensure that as many people are going to not only get that that baseline academic education, but then they can keep reskilling themselves and keep filling in those gaps so they can really reach their potential. For you, what are some things that we can as parents, as as workers, as

people interested in furthering education and investing in it. What are some practical things that people can do well the individual level. I'll start with a parent. I think the best thing that you could do for your children and likely for yourself is to have the attitude of a lifelong learner. You know, I cringe a little bit when a parent will tell me in front of their child like, oh, algebra. Oh that scares me because it signals the wrong thing

to their child. And I would and what instead? I wish I could hear the parent And I do hear this from parents, and I like here or I coached them to say this. It's like yeah, you know, the first time I learned algebra, I didn't really get it, and I wish I did because it helps people build the analytical skills of critical thinking skills that you are going to need throughout life. And now we're in this renaissance where we are able to learn through free tools

run by nonprofits on the internet. I as a forty year old, I'm going to go back and learn this properly. And I guarantee you if if they're ten year old sees that, they're like, wow, if mom and dad are doing it now, I want to do it with them. And it's actually a great thing to bond around, to go on a shared learning journey with them. So I would say that's that's number one as a parent, and that's also going to help the parent in their life

as well. There you know, actually algebra in particular and unlocks all sorts of things. I guarantee you there's all sorts of thirty year olds, thirty five year olds, four year olds, fifty year olds who know in their field regardless of what they are. They might be doctors, they might be lawyers, but they're like I have a feeling that there's some opportunities to do some interesting things with technology in my space. But gee, to do that, I'd have to learn the program. But to learn a program,

I have to re engage with mathematics. And I'm afraid of mathematics. Well, you shouldn't have to be anymore. There's no stigma. You don't have to be embarrassed that you're a little shaky on dividing decimals, are a little shaky on exponents. Do it at your own time and pace, build that muscle. Learn it and you'll find that it's really not that daunting, and you'll find that it's it's actually quite empowering, and it's going to give you momentum to keep doing that as the pace of change and

the skills you need continue to adapt. We're living in a time right now where technology is making us rethink the nature of human purpose and potential. This can be scary but also thrilling. If we can muster the energy, sal thinks we could perhaps see the strangest and most

beautiful byproduct of technology. Yet, millions of people, unshackled by automation from repetitive and mind numbing labor, empowered with the skills to participate in what could be the most exciting century yet like Think of what we could do if our brains were loaded up just right and the robots did all our work for us. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefeller Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and Ruth Barnes from

Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Mia LaBelle, Research by Sheer, Vincent engineering by Jason Gambrel and the great folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton, Carly Mgliori, Jacob weiss Berg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go solve it.