Open.

Salman Khan was interviewed on the occasion of the release of his new book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined ...

What does the school of the future look like, as you see it?

We can define it by what it is, or maybe by what it is not. You won’t have bells ringing every 50 minutes. You won’t have a state-mandated curriculum where all the students and all the teachers are all going at the same pace. Students are not going to be in these rooms where all the desks are pointed at the chalkboard and there is somebody lecturing at them.

What I imagine is much more open, collaborative workspaces. I imagine the students come in, and they work with their mentors. Their mentors will be both students, possibly older students or students who have shown maturity, and the master teachers. They will set goals. Based on those goals that they are trying to achieve, they have a rough allocation of how they might want to be spending their time. One day a student might want to go deep on trigonometry. Then, he or she might spend two weeks researching some problem in biology or writing a short story.

Both teachers and student mentors will be able to keep track and say, “Look, it’s great that you’ve spent the last month working on your novel. We think that is a really important life experience. But we think you need to invest a little bit more time in your core math skills.

Students will build a portfolio of their creative works; it will serve as their academic credentials to show, “Look, I really do know geometry, or I really do have a basic understanding of American History.” It will also include an evaluation as a peer mentor. How good was the student at helping other people? At explaining things? At first it sounds like a very pie-in-the-sky, touchy-feely thing, but this is actually what employers care about.

So you don’t believe in letter grades?

For me, letter grades are a very superficial thing. An “A” can make it look like there was rigor when there wasn’t any. What does an “A” mean? It depends on how hard or rigorous the assessments were. It gives you very little information. They allow us to assess people, realize they have gaps in their knowledge and then just push them forward, guaranteeing that at some point they are going to get frustrated and kind of fall off the bus.

You call for the end of summer vacation. Why?

We want students to learn! Right now, students are spending nine months stressed, going through drills, memorizing things before an exam and then forgetting it. Then, they go to summer vacation. Some of the most affluent or motivated kids might be able to pull off having a very creative summer vacation, but most don’t. For most, it is just kind of lost time.

When people say, “Summer vacation, those are my best memories. That is when I actually got to do creative things. That is when we actually got to travel,” I say, yeah, exactly, that is what the whole year should be like. Make school year-round, but also make it much more like a creative summer camp.

Read the rest at The Smithsonian.