"Push us. Push yourself."

In a recent post titled, "What's the point of being educated if you're illiterate?", I criticised our education system and our educators for failing our youngsters. I highlighted the inability of many undergraduate and master's level students to even spell simple words correctly and I wrote:

Neither at the high school level nor at the undergraduate level do teachers bother, I am told, to check and correct spellings in their pupils' written assignments and examination answer sheets. One reason for this may be the inability to deal with, and lack of time for, 40 or 50 or more students. However, I suspect that lack of interest is also a problem.

Yesterday Faye D'Souza (Class of 2004) sent me the link to a brilliant blog post by American entrepreneur and author Seth Godin lambasting "mediocre professors" and the education system in the US. See how much we have in common?

Godin, who popularised the concept of "permission marketing", is highly critical of...

"...professors who spend hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook... professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field, professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. ... And most of all, professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt."

And Godin concludes by coining a slogan after my own heart when he urges students to tell their teachers:

"This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!"

Now, Commitscions, where have you heard that before?

***

Earlier this month, on October 20, Seth Godin made another astute observation on the importance of reading (thanks for this link, too, Faye):

If you're in the idea business, what's going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks.

I am so glad that there are others out there who believe that reading can transform our lives. And who are happy to rant about it.

To read Godin's post in its entirety, go to "Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant]".

• Photo courtesy:  #SethSaid.com

Salman Khan gets a glowing video testimonial from Bill Gates

That's because he's a really, really good teacher. No, this is not Sallu bhai we're talking about here but his namesake, a Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager who runs Khan Academy, surely the world's most unusual educational institute, from his home in Silicon Valley, California.

"This guy is amazing," Gates wrote in an email quoted in David Kaplan's article in the September 6 issue of Fortune. "It's awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources."

Kaplan continues:

Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the "mind-blowing misallocation" of resources away from education, Gates touted the "unbelievable" 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials "I've been using with my kids."

So what is Khan Academy?

According to Kaplan:

Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most popular educational site on the web. Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day ... Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide.... Most page views come from the U.S., followed by Canada, England, Australia, and India. In any given month, Khan says, he's reached about 200,000 students. "There's no reason it shouldn't be 20 million."

Isn't that an incredible statistic?

What is also interesting is the way Kaplan structures his feature, which is not only a profile of Khan but also a look at individual achievement and a study of how venture capital companies and entrepreneurs sniff out the next big idea.

Read the article here: "Bill Gates' favourite teacher". You can visit Khan Academy here.