Sal Khan Quotes

Sal Khan

Profession : Educator

Birth : October 11, 1976

Later in life, when my kids struggle to understand a tricky concept or master a new skill, I want them to have the strength and experience to tell themselves, 'I don't know how to do this... yet!' I want them to be confident that, even if something seems challenging today, they have what it takes to figure it out.

Sal Khan

Our mission at Khan Academy is a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere, and college readiness is a crucial part of that. We want to help as many students as possible prepare for college and for life, and since the SAT measures preparedness for college, our partnership with the College Board is a natural fit.

Sal Khan

Sometimes I think people confuse rote learning with traditional conceptual instruction.

Sal Khan

Education has to be more than tests and formulas.

Sal Khan

Some of the beauty of a university is that every professor is given a lot of autonomy over what he or she does. That's also what makes it very hard for even a very forward-thinking president to change courses.

Sal Khan

I am infamously bad at asking for money.

Sal Khan

Suffice it to say that our over-reliance on testing is based largely on habit, wishful thinking, and leaps of faith.

Sal Khan

Every school is different and serves different populations.

Sal Khan

I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.

Sal Khan

I'm big fan of soulful music - classic rock with a folk-ish twist.

Sal Khan

I'm actually a bit of a technophobe, which surprises people. I like to stay unplugged as much as possible.

Sal Khan

I'm not the kind to hang out on Facebook or Twitter or even talk on the cellphone, really.

Sal Khan

I was always asking people about their work. How do you do a job like that? Do you love it? What does it pay? I was lucky to have access to people who could answer my questions. Otherwise, my life could have turned out very differently.

Sal Khan

One of the biggest ways to level the playing field is to give all young people the same context on what opportunities are out there. And that means touching on some of the questions that are a little taboo in society: How much money do you make? What are your stresses? What would you do differently if you could?

Sal Khan

The math you need for most of finance is ninth-grade algebra, and most people feel reasonably comfortable with that. But I think the financial world there has been - I don't know if it's by design, or this is how it's evolved - there are bad actors who have wanted to obfuscate because you can benefit from the lack of transparency.

Sal Khan

Something happens in school sometimes where you're like, 'Oh, I'm not an expert, and I have to defer to people who are.' And it happens not just in school: it happens in religion, too. Defer to the experts. A printing press is a big deal - they got the Bible, and all of a sudden they could read it for themselves.

Sal Khan

My personal narrative - I was lucky early on in my career to have some really strong mentors. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what really built me up.

Sal Khan

In Idaho, we hope to see educators using Khan Academy to individualize their instruction. Instead of a one-size-fits-all lesson, teachers will be able to focus their attention on specific students who are struggling while the rest of the class engages with material appropriate for them.

Sal Khan

What you have in most education software is that they're catering to the decision-maker who makes the budget allocations, and that decision-maker has a lot of check boxes. Does it do this? Check. Does it do that? Check. They could care less about the end user experience.

Sal Khan

A lot of times, when kids have problems with algebra or trigonometry, it has nothing to do with the subject matter, has nothing to do with their innate intelligence. It's just they that they had some gaps in elementary school that they never got to fill in.

Sal Khan