Disruptive Education

“About a fifth of American 15-year-olds do not have basic competence in science; 23% can’t use math in daily life.”

This line lingered at the bottom of the paragraph in the reading assignment, “One Man, One Computer: How Khan Academy is Reinventing Education.” When we talk in class about disruptions, and, namely, how we can identify waves of the emerging changes upon which  disruptors ride, it’s clear that education displays indicators pointing ahead to innovation and change rapidly approaching.

With public education widely suffering at the hands of public sector funding shortages and disparate resources, those in the most disadvantaged communities watch as their children fall further and further behind in the achievement gap. The IT revolution’s emergence into a wide spectrum of previously uninterrupted pools of the status quo, from transportation to journalism, has continued to expand, now approaching the inaccessible-shores of a basic human right.

As a social innovator, Salman Khan’s credentials more than check out. 

His MIT and Harvard training provides him with a healthy set of for-profit opportunities in the innovation space. But Kahn, like fellow social innovator Muhammad Yunus, took an idea, educational software, which would traditionally have been leveraged toward profit-motivated ends in a different direction. Instead, Khan positioned his new organization's mission to catalyze and result in positive social impact. Khan Academy’s status as a non-profit 501c3, paired with its effective and widely used online video tutorials, combine to produce an offering with the potential to radically shift the long-stable ground occupied by education circles. 

Indeed, Khan academy could be a keystone piece in a push to democratize educational opportunity across the globe, from developing economies to urban American centers.

As the education field finds itself preparing to weather a looming wave sure to shake ineffevtive equilibrium already rattled by policy pressures, Khan Academy could be indicative of ventures able to develop new ways to understand social problems. What's more, with minds dedicated to redesigning possible solutions to surmont barriers to education, there is added hope that we might yet accomplish an as-yet impossible task: equiping all people to access the tools to build avenues to opportunity.