Dronacharya바카라�s Voice-Over

It hurts to criticise a sparkling teacher. What makes it more painful is that Salman Khan, of the online Khan Academy, is teacher to nearly 35 per cent of the world바카라�s people, that is, those with access to the internet. In The One World School House, Khan writes with 바카라�so let me tell you a bit about my background바카라� ease of how a series of YouTube lessons for his cousin Nadia grew into an electronic peepal tree of learning, watered by believers like Bill and Melinda Gates. He also explains his choice of an austere aesthetic for his videos: all you see is a blackboard with a cursor writing in coloured chalk. (Khan is a voice-over.) In later chapters, he outlines what he바카라�d like the academy to become in a world where schooling does not interfere with education. It바카라�s quite a fascinating account, to be sure, although it takes the well-set, well-known pattern of so many celebrated stories of dreamer-doers.

But do we need Khan to tell us what바카라�s wrong with pedagogy, practised for some centuries now with lockstep militarism? Or why and how classrooms stifle creativity? Or why students tune in to their doodling as they tune out of what a bore is diagramming on the blackboard? It would have been more helpful perhaps to write of how he beat the very system he rips up so thoroug­hly and how he sustained interest through tenacious self-learning and self-motivation. After all, he바카라�s an outl­ier whose compass steadily pulled him North-to-Success바카라�Math Olympiads, MIT and a job as hedge-fund analyst바카라�before avocational brilliance brought him fame and a lifelong mission.

And shorn of hype, what Khan바카라�s tutorials do바카라�online and for free바카라�is what systematic note-taking used to do before programmed learning modules, audio and video recordings of lectures, and the internet arrived: allow the diligent to self-learn at the time and place of their choosing. Perhaps Khan바카라�s own scholastic modus operandi.

Closing thought: A lecture, a module of programmed learning, a textbook even, can only be as stimulating as the person behind it. Would Khan have clicked (and been clicked on more than 243 million times) if he were a drone and not the dazzling, democratic Dronacharya that he is?