I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve been really kind of grumpy about Khan Academy lately. I mean, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. I recommended it to math teachers, and it certainly would help to enable the kind of math class I wrote about when I talked about Inversions a while back. And I don’t know that I’m being completely fair to Khan Academy. I think I get angry whenever I see people talking about how Khan Academy is going to revolutionize education all by itself.

Khan Academy is a visual textbook. It is the pre-packed lecture. And it’s the first which is always useful in the internet game. (But I am sure one of the larger textbook companies are busy creating a much more slickly packaged version of much the same thing.) And there are probably some students who can learn math strictly from Khan Academy videos… maybe more than could just learn math from a textbook because of the new modality.

What concerns me when I listen to folks like Bill Gates wax rhapsodic about Khan Academy is that it seems to me to be one more moment when people who should know better are, essentially, saying, “See! We don’t need teachers anymore!” As if every student could learn from a pre-packaged delivery model of content.

It doesn’t work that way.

Khan Academy is great if you need a refresher… or if you need another look at an idea. But watching a video about a concept isn’t the way you necessarily learn it… even when you have a somewhat drill-and-kill quiz system behind it. Khan Academy will work well for the kids whose teachers still spend 80% of the time lecturing at the front of the room. But it won’t do that much anywhere where teachers have learned how to present ideas concisely and then spend their class time working with kids.

Let us remember that, whether it is face to face or online, many kids make meaning and sense of their world when they interact with adults who help them. The Khan Academy lectures are a pretty good content delivery methodology. It’s not as engaging as Conrad Wolfram’s TED Talk as a learning moment, for example, but they are solidly presented. And it’s only the first major attempt at this kind of comprehensive online lecture repository. (There will be more.)

But it’s what happens after a student watches them that is the question. Who will help them move from exposure to the ideas to understanding? Who will help them figure out how to apply the math of the lectures to the world around them in meaningful ways?

There’s nothing wrong with Khan Academy – it’s a good modern / multi-media textbook. And I’m sure it’s been an incredible secondary resource for thousands of kids. And I have no doubt that we could wisely use tools like Khan Academy so that teachers and students had more time to try to really work together because the lecture has been outsourced.

It is my hope that tools like Khan Academy will help empower more and more students to understand that the tools are out there to teach themselves, but all of us have the moments where we need others to help us learn. If it accomplishes that, then Khan Academy will have done an incredible service in transforming education.

But let’s never forget that — even in the best case scenario — once kids have learned the mechanics of the math that Khan explains, then they have to figure out how, when and why to use the math they learn. And I feel like Khan Academy does little to move us closer to that. For that, most kids will still – and always – need people (adults, fellow students, whomever) who will spend the time to help them make sense of their world.

The other day, I was talking to a young teacher, and I said, “Be very circumspect any time you think you’re a really great teacher because a small group of kids are telling you how wonderful you are. There will almost certainly always be a handful of kids who love what you do. I worry that the students who are leaving the glowing YouTube comments aren’t yet a representative sample, nor as they using it as students would once it was brought in as an official “program” in schools. I worry that many students would be done a great disservice if Khan Academy – or any “content delivery” protocol would create a scenario where we didn’t think we needed teachers anymore.