Yeah the article feels as though its describing Khan Academy from 10 or more years ago - it is quite odd.

"What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learn, what motivates them, what makes the difference between someone who pushes through difficulty and someone who types “IDK.”"

It is almost as though the author thinks that Khan Academy is an organization of 1, and that they don't employ learning scientists and have a content team and don't publish research papers in the learning science field.

You are wrong in understanding the article.

Khan: Videos + rote exercises

Learning: Projects, complex problem-solving, exploration, argumentation, etc.

Dewey is worth reading.

Direct Instruction - and the largest educational study ever untaken Project Follow Through - would like a work. Project based learning?

Recall practice IS learning. Projects, exploration, and discovery-based "learning" sounds great in theory but in practice, without actual testing, really doesn't live up to the hype.

Adam Boxer is worth reading.

I should clarify -- since from both posts, my comment was ambiguous and misinterpreted:

I was explaining the article, not my views, since the top-level comment did not read it.

Regarding your comment, it is as wrong as the article. BOTH are important. Recall practice is great for e.g. developing surface understanding, declarative knowledge, and well-done, procedural knowledge.

That type of knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient, for high-level performance in most fields, at least beyond a spelling bee or vocab exam. To understand gaps, see:

- Complex problem-solving, which includes extensive conditional, conceptual, metacognitive, etc. knowledge. (e.g. see how top participants prep for math olympiads)

- Attitudes towards school / learning (one of the top predictors of future success by 3rd grade, together with reading)

- Transfer learning

- Cross-cutting / not explicitly represented knowledge / literature on expert blindspot

- Etc.

"Projects, exploration, and discovery-based 'learning'" work great in practice, when properly structured, which usually means explicit, well-defined learning objectives.

Bad: "Make a nice poster on selling a car"

Good: "Independently explore an organ system of the human body. Make a nice poster synthesizing what you learned and present it to the classroom in three weeks."

Particularly in early mathematics and language acquisition (but also in most learning domains) you need both rote learning and exploratory learning. Fundamental concepts + exercises to build muscle memory are foundational to enabling students to participate fruitfully in meaningful projects, complex problem-solving, exploration and argumentation.

If you're flailing around without having memorized basic trigonometric identities, you're going to struggle severely to apply them to classical mechanics. If you can't do basic matrix multiplication, you're not going to build a graphics engine.

The article tries to damn Khan with an example about probing how neural myelination works. If you understand the foundations of electricity (by learning about capacitance and impedance) and have done some grueling foundational learning in organic chemistry, ready answers might spring to your mind. You need the former to make asking the latter fruitful or meaningful.

Khan deliberately uses the term "scaffolding" - which since we're throwing around dead education theorists harks from Vygotsky - which is precisely what a teacher provides by pantomiming elementary concepts for a child. Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence.

I really don't understand this article. Two things can be true at once.

I was explaining the article, not making a statement about how learning works. My comment was poorly phrased.

I agree with everything you said, except Vygotsky. :)

Vygotsky is worth reading, since:

- He is evidence-based. He isn't just a theorist. He cites studies. This contrasts with educational philosophers which dominated literature of the time.

- He is universally misquoted in US education literature, usually to say banally obvious things.

- He is brilliant.

- In the concept of ZPD, US education literature usually says the literal opposite of what Vygotsky said.

Do you really thing the concept of scaffolding didn't exist before 1900?

Curiously, Vygotsky precisely has a passage about (positive) experience with throwing special-needs students into the deep end of the pool on tasks they can't succeed with, and contradicts the (incorrect) intuition behind the teaching process implied by:

"Ultimately the child needs to internalize these basics to succeed in more complex projects with a sense of independence."

To be specific, a child does need to ultimately internalize these, but one of the best ways to do so is through a certain type of struggle, rather than breaking down into little pieces, in the ways consistently attributed to him.

I agree with you. It's just an attention bite as nobody would care about this article if it wasn't focused on something as big and popular as Khan Academy. It's clear that the author has never used it as a place to learn something.

I've read the article (except skimming \ fast forwarding 3rd and 2nd paragraph from the end) and it wasn't there. No detailed info explaining why author's criticizing Khan Academy for not doing something it in my experience did. Maybe you haven't read it?

This article is an example of a rather poor piece of writing. You can't blame people for skimming through it.