SAL KHAN

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 do believe that education should become as close to free as possible.

When I used to try and describe what the Khan Academy was, I would tell people that if it were a for-profit, I would be on the cover of 'Forbes.'

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.

There are things you can get in that physical experience you cannot get virtually.

We want to make access to a world-class education like clean drinking water or electricity.

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

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.

I always wanted to start a school. I talked about it in college - but I didn't do anything about it.

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.

One's perception of themselves has a much bigger role than has been acknowledged to determine who succeeds and who does not.

People who are looked up to in America will often say, 'I don't get math.' And they'll often say it like they're being humble, but they seem almost proud of it because it's acceptable to act this way.

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.

The single most important personal finance decision you make is your career.

Many of the best teachers I know are being laid off because their unions value seniority over intellect, passion, creativity, and drive.

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

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

We don't believe that you should ever replace physical education. Even in a thousand years, a computer will never be able to do so.

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.

We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.

If you're going to charge someone for something, you have to show them value for it.

Every school is different and serves different populations.

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

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.