Quotes from Sal Khan

The ideal direction is using something like Khan Academy for every student to work at their own pace, to master concepts before moving on, and then the teacher using Khan Academy as a tool so that you can have a room of 20 or 30 kids all working on different things, but you can still kind of administrate that chaos.

To be clear, people are the most important part of any classroom. If given the choice between a great teacher and the world's most advanced education technology, I'd pick the teacher any day for my own children.

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?

I'd set up the Khan Academy as a not-for-profit in 2008, but I was doing well in my job and initially thought I could fund the Academy myself. But by 2009, I was getting so much good feedback that I told my wife that I wanted to do this full time. We had some funds to fall back on, and I knew doing this made me happy.

As technology plays a major role inside and outside the classroom, we want to make sure education innovation is accessible.

Our goal with Khan Academy Kids is to inspire a life-long love of learning.

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

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.

You only have so much time in the day, and you only have so many working years. Where do you want to invest that life?

I am personally an idealist. I was lucky enough to follow my dreams in my own life, so you should definitely follow your dreams.

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.

Can watching video lessons or using interactive software make people smart? No. But I would argue that it can do something even better: create a context in which people can give free rein to their curiosity and natural love of learning so that they realize they're already smart.

One cannot be dogmatic about the right solution.

No one goes on a direct path, even though it sometimes feels like your peers might be racing ahead. Everyone's trying to figure it out. But if you just put yourself out there, step out of your comfort zone, establish yourself in terms of skills, mentorship, but leave space for your passions, then you're going to turn out pretty well.

I realized that there are many people who are very good students, but they think of themselves as bad students. At the end of the day, what they are really missing is way to understand where their gaps are and a way to address those gaps.

I think history shows us that there is not one credible credential that has come from the for-profit reality, and that is because the for-profit reality is inherently motivated to maximize the level of people that take it.

I've been surprised at how motivated a lot of people are that you wouldn't traditionally think would be that kind of a motivated student.

The whole reason why we have this kind of assembly line model of education that we inherited from the Prussians, is they were the first people - it's a very egalitarian motive - to say how do we educate everyone.

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

Louisiana was as close to South Asia as the United States could get: it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government.

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.

A good traditional conceptual instruction is what I got from my better professors at MIT. They would be at a chalkboard, and they would literally be explaining something and working through a problem, but it wasn't rote. They were explaining the underlying theory and processes and intuition behind it.

People in the media and press often say they've never been good at math. It might be that people that consider themselves creative didn't consider themselves good at math or didn't find math interesting at those early stages. And those creative people are disproportionately represented in those influential roles.

Education is not an end to itself. You need to know algebra but also how to navigate the world.