Stella's Blog FNED 502: Khan, The One World Schoolhouse

While reading Khan's Part 2:The Broken Model: Short History of American School, I found myself reflecting on my own relationship with school. My experience with schooling has always been complicated. Even as someone who genuinely loves learning, values education, and pursued higher education, I can identify school itself as a catalyst for many of the anxieties I still struggle with today. Throughout my educational experience, I often felt trapped, policed, and subservient. I remember constantly feeling like there was a correct way to behave, think, write, and participate that extended beyond simply understanding content. Success often felt less connected to authentic learning and more connected to learning how to operate within the system itself.

Looking back, much of my academic performance also felt rooted in fear rather than curiosity. I was not motivated by excitement around learning or discovery; instead, I was often motivated by fear of failure, fear of disappointing teachers, fear of receiving poor grades, or fear of falling behind expectations. While that fear frequently translated into strong academic performance, it came at the expense of intellectual curiosity. Reading Khan's critique articulated feelings I have had for many years but struggled to name.

Khan traces many of these attributed to the Prussian model of education, which later influenced American education through Horace Mann during industrialization and efforts at "Americanization." He explains that the purpose of this model was not to produce independent thinkers, but "to church out loyal tractable citizens who would learn the value of submitting to the authority of parents, teacher, church, and , ultimately, king" (Khan, 2012). While contemporary schools differ in many ways, this idea is still too familiar, and extends far beyond elementary schooling. As I moved through higher education, I noticed that the same patterns continued. My imagination often felt secondary to producing the kinds of responses institutions expected, and classes could become echo chambers that reward the repeated delivery of accepted ideas over the pursuit of genuinely new questions or perspectives. While universities are often positioned as places of innovation and intellectual discovery, my own experience has sometimes felt more focused on learning established frameworks and reproducing them correctly. This does not mean higher education lacks value, but it supports Khan and Johnson's separate assertions that institutions reproduce themselves through norms and patterns that become so embedded they appear natural.

Khan complicated these ideas further when he argues that the "villain is not the government but the corporations that have the most to gain from a well-behaved and conformist population" (Khan, 2012). He reinforces this point through John Taylor Gatto, who urged readers to "wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands...School trains children to be employees and consumers" (Khan, 2012).

It is important to connect this critical piece to Johnson's argument that systems of power and inequality persist because people participate in patterns that become normalized and invisible (Johnson, 2018). The education system functions in this way, and not only teaches content, but also relationships to power itself. As a very critically conscious teacher, this gives me hope. If education has historically functioned as a mechanism for producing conformity, then teaching can become an act of resistance. As someone who views education as empowerment rather than control, I can strive to create a space where students question assumptions, challenge hierarchies, and understand learning as something they can actively own. If schools socialize students into obedience, classrooms can also become places where students learn autonomy, imagination, and breaking the mold.