After reading a few comments, I haven't seen this point made so I'm gonna go for it:
> The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure,
> but does not expect mastery.
> We encourage you to experiment [and fail], but we do expect mastery.
This, in my opinion, is the most potential ridden idea made by Khan. Today, middle schools is ~3 years, high school is 4 years, university is 4 years, etc.; we discretize learning into these rigid chunks of time - partially out of (deprecated) technical necessity - and in the process we isolate kids - the so called dumb kids. When Kahn showed that graph of a so called dumb kids spending 2-3x as long on a single topic, only to resume the same learning rate as the smart kids after they understood the foundational concept they were originally struggling with, it made me see how much potential there truly is in this system.
Imagine a world where the baseline level of education is produced by a Khan style system. Schooling wouldn't be as tractable (i.e., it might take 2 to 6 (or more) years to go through high school instead of a nice predictable 4), but everyone that would come out of said system would have the same (ideal) level of knowledge needed in order to move on to the next best thing (e.g., college, work, life's passion, etc.). There wouldn't be kids competing for GPA's or stuffing their resumes, and there wouldn't be kids who didn't know how to tie their shoes; there would be kids who KNOW calculus, kids who UNDERSTAND physics, and kids who GET American history. The variation would be in the idiosyncrasies of the topics, as opposed to the core concepts.
Now imagine further to what this does for higher education. In this proposed system, it would simply be a fact that graduating kids would know - at mastery level - what their school's curriculums listed off; it's the equivalent of everyone having a 1600 on their SAT's. College acceptance becomes less of a selectivity problem, and more of an efficiency problem; where are all these geniuses going to study!
Ahhh, the potential is so exciting...
That being said, as sort of an aside I think it's noteworthy to say that the idea of fixing the tuition-based University model is a bit more complex than the high school model, but as user arjn said bellow, there are plenty of free lecture repositories out there already; perhaps if prior educational systems encouraged and indoctrinated students to be more self-proficient (as in the Khan system), University learning becomes more about educating yourself, and those free lectures will (naturally) replace the pay-to-learn model. I don't know, but it's a thought...
>and there wouldn't be kids who didn't know how to tie their shoes;
I've met at least a few people who, being charitable, I would be extremely hard pressed to see passing a calculus exam. I'd agree that for some it's down to motivation but the motivation may come 20+years later or not at all.
Certainly though I'm extremely wary of declaring that all people can attain the same intellectual level which appears to be what you claim.
I'm not going to say it's impossible but I think you must have missed a step where you do some sort of brain augmentation or injection of nanobots to build knowledge pathways without any need to apply a learning process ...
My little rant is definitely meant to be more persuasive than quantifiably accurate; take it with a grain of salt.
Regardless, I don't think the existence of can't-be-motivated learners compromises the ideals of a Khan-like system. Sure there are kids that aren't going to get it no matter what, but their productivity in any system is going to be nill, Khan, tradtional, or otherwise.
Imagine a world where the baseline level of education is produced by a Khan style system. Schooling wouldn't be as tractable (i.e., it might take 2 to 6 (or more) years to go through high school instead of a nice predictable 4), but everyone that would come out of said system would have the same (ideal) level of knowledge needed in order to move on to the next best thing (e.g., college, work, life's passion, etc.). There wouldn't be kids competing for GPA's or stuffing their resumes, and there wouldn't be kids who didn't know how to tie their shoes; there would be kids who KNOW calculus, kids who UNDERSTAND physics, and kids who GET American history. The variation would be in the idiosyncrasies of the topics, as opposed to the core concepts.
Now imagine further to what this does for higher education. In this proposed system, it would simply be a fact that graduating kids would know - at mastery level - what their school's curriculums listed off; it's the equivalent of everyone having a 1600 on their SAT's. College acceptance becomes less of a selectivity problem, and more of an efficiency problem; where are all these geniuses going to study!
Ahhh, the potential is so exciting...
That being said, as sort of an aside I think it's noteworthy to say that the idea of fixing the tuition-based University model is a bit more complex than the high school model, but as user arjn said bellow, there are plenty of free lecture repositories out there already; perhaps if prior educational systems encouraged and indoctrinated students to be more self-proficient (as in the Khan system), University learning becomes more about educating yourself, and those free lectures will (naturally) replace the pay-to-learn model. I don't know, but it's a thought...