Review of “The One World Schoolhouse”

Catharine R. Stimpson   |   

“Bliss was it that dawn to be alive,” wrote William Wordsworth, the canonical Romantic poet, “But to be young was very Heaven!” Born in 1770, he was remembering the joys of being an Englishman in France during the Revolutionary period.

Today, a tribe of exuberant, game-changing revolutionaries is storming, not the Bastille in Paris, but classrooms in America. Salman Khan is among the happiest and more attractive of these warriors. The One World Schoolhouse is his self-representation and a self-introduction to the world. It begins disarmingly, “My name is Sal Khan. I’m the founder and original faculty of the Khan Academy” (p. 1).

In part, the source of Khan’s likeability is the amiable, plain populism of his ambition for his eponymous Academy, “To provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere” (p. 221). Technology is the servant of this goal. If he succeeds, “tens of millions” of kids will gain access to education. The gap between rich and poor, between developed and developing societies, will vanish.

« Back to Archive