Isn't this kind of a straw man? Salman Khan is not a fascist dictator who prevents you from getting information anywhere else. He's just a teacher. I don't see how learning from him is more of a problem than learning from other teacher.
You could make your point even stronger: since the barriers to entry on the internet are so low, it has the potential to be a lot less intellectually constraining than an ordinary classroom, where typically there will be one teacher, with standardized lesson plans, teaching from a relentlessly bland textbook that passed through the censors in Texas and California.
But the Internet also has a significant winner-take-all character at the large end of the spectrum, due to network effects. See Facebook vs. MySpace and all the other social network carcasses in its wake. Mr. Khan's teaching videos might end up being the one-and-only source of education on the Internet. What then?
Then you can make your own better video and YouTube or Khan itself will host if for free and show that what you were afraid of is not actually possible and the social networking analogy does not hold up under cursory analysis.
The complaint is that he seems to be getting attention from a major donator and source of influence, which might get his "lessons" far more play than any random teacher. Which is a problem for the author since he feels the quality of the lessons is low.
I agree with him; these look like "make me look not stupid in casual conversation" lessons, they don't seem to impart a real understanding of history, of these major events and what impact they have on the present world.
And does anyone with a high school level education in history even understand WHY the archduke of Austria was assassinated? Or WHY none of the powers at the time could pull out of the resulting domino effect? Or the onerous terms of the treaty after the first war? Or the discontent it sowed, leaving fertile ground for a dictator to emerge? Without this context, how could WW2 ever be understood? And even this is glossing over a lot of important stuff, such as the various nations' foreign policy, public sentiment, local politics, and how it affected pretty much every operation of the war.
Who even remembers operation Market Garden or why it was significant?
Does anyone even know why and how bombing of metropolitan centers even started? Of course not! Easier to say goodies vs baddies and forget the details.
History is already taught without any useful context in school. It's rendered so dry and boring and detached from humanity that I'm surprised ANY learning happens at all.
Khan is doing very high level, very loose connections at the moment which, I'll admit, contain even less information than the school system pulp. However, I'd be interested in seeing how deep he goes with subsequent videos before passing judgment.
Yup, he could very well address this with more in depth videos, this being the super-quick overview so people can form a loose structure in their head.
Archduke was incredibly disliked by the people he was governing. Why none pulled out is a mystery to me. The terms basically crippled Germany until they decided to call the allies' bluff.
I have yet to take a college level history course, so I probably have errors.
It is a 15-minute video. That leaves approximately 99.995% of a viewer's life free to dig a little deeper into the subject matter.
The quality contest is not Khan vs a Ph.D program in history, it is Khan vs Insane Clown Posse. Khan wins.
