Sal Khan Quotes

At the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, we learned to express ourselves, and I've been expressing myself ever since.

You learn how to be book smart in school, but you better not forget that you also need to be street smart.

The goal, I think, of American education, for decades, and across many, many scholars, was basically to teach people broad lessons in how to live life, how to engage life, how to essentially be effective citizens and effective people.

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

You need to prepare the child you have for the world that exists.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.

School is something that you learn - reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.

Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity.

Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.

In a world that places a growing premium on social skills, education systems need to do much better at fostering those skills systematically across the school curriculum.

The primary aim of our schools should be to help children grow into happy, healthy and confident adults, equipped with the skills to achieve their goals in life and work.

Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let's get to work on them.

You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.

Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner.

The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school. Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.

Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation.

... though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.

Education does not mean the imparting of verbal knowledge alone.

There is something out of gear about graded schools and all that. Memory is developed at the expense of what in general we are pleased to call thought and character.

The trouble with school is they give you the answer, then they give you the exam. That's not life.

Happiness is a skill, emotional balance is a skill, compassion and altruism are skills, and like any skill they need to be developed. That's what education is about.

Education best serves students by helping them be more self-reflective.

It can be tempting to blame others for our loss of direction. We get lots of information about life but little education in life from parents, teachers, and other authority figures who should know better from their experience. Information is about facts. Education is about wisdom and the knowledge of how to love and survive.