The education visionary: Khan Academy founder Salman Khan on the future of learning.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Interview

"THERE'S A LOT MORE demand for people who want to just improve themselves than anyone would have guessed," says Salman Khan, founder of the wildly popular free educational video series that bears his name and author of the new book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined (Twelve).

Khan, a 36-year-old Bangladeshi American, first put together a couple of video tutorials in 2004 to help his young cousins learn math. The videos proved so popular on YouTube that two years later he launched the nonprofit Khan Academy to offer free online lectures and tutorials that are now used by more than 6 million students each month. More than 3,000 individual videos, covering mathematics, physics, history, economics, and other subjects, have drawn more than 200 million views, generating significant funding from both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Khan Academy is one of the best-known names in online education and has grown to include not just tutorials but complete course syllabi and a platform to track student progress.

Reason TV Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie sat down with Khan in October to discuss how American education can be radically transformed, why technology is so widely misused in K-12, and how massive amounts of taxpayer money never make it inside conventional public classrooms.

reason: Talk a little bit about the videos and the enormous growth in their audience during the last few years.

Salman Khan: People who look at the videos will see someone writing on a digital blackboard. And you'll hear a voice. For a lot of the videos it'll be my voice, working through things, thinking through things--very conversational. It started with me making it for my cousins. It soon became clear that people who were not my cousins were watching them. They just kind of took on a life of their own.

Many things have surprised me over the last several years. The biggest thing is that when I made these things I assumed these were for my cousins; they were pretty motivated students. I made them for what I would have wanted if I were iv years old or 13 or 18 years old. I said: Well, maybe this will be for the subset of people who are really motivated, whatever that means. They'll actually seek out knowledge on the Internet, and then they'll find it useful.

It didn't take long to realize that the feedback we were getting was from people who were not the traditionally motivated: kids who were about to fail classes, kids who were thinking about dropping out, people who were going back to school. And they were saying [the videos] make me understand the intuition, the big picture, and I'm starting to get excited about math. So the big realization is--and I think this surprised frankly everybody--there's a lot more demand from people who just want to improve themselves than anyone would have guessed.

reason: In the book you mention that New York state spends about $18,000 per public school student per year. Clearly New York state is not known for great schools or great outcomes. We're spending $18,000 a year for flat results over the past 40 years for public schools. What's wrong with the status quo?

Khan: The reason I highlighted that in the book is that a lot of times people make it sound like it's a money issue. The problem is you can never say you're spending too much on education. It's such an important thing; if you can get a dollar of value in education, it's worth it.

reason: Although that's not what's been happening.

Khan: Exactly. And when you look at the $18,000 number (or even in the lower districts that spend less...