Khan Academy

I might have mentioned Khan Academy once before on this blog but I talk about it a lot more in daily life.  Going to www.khanacademy.org has been life-changing for me.  It was originally a bunch of YouTube videos that Salman Khan made to help tutor his niece in Algebra and has grown into this miraculous website for the express purpose of giving the whole world a free education.

I spent most of my time there studying math or reviewing old subjects to freshen my mind.  Even though I don’t need it or even intend to use Trigonometry, it’s nice to know there’s a place out there where I can find a good teacher and I can do it on my own time.

I have felt nothing but happiness and accomplishment (and even a little bit of pride) from watching these great videos, where he can go from the sciences to banking and current events.  But this past week, I started the Humanities videos and I feel something new: anger.

I finished American History and went onto European History, and the more I watched, the more pissed off I got because I realized just how badly I’ve been screwed by the American public school system.

I took AP World History in high school and continued to make my best grades in History classes.  I took nearly every History class they offered when I went to college and I never learned half of what is contained in a handful of twelve-minute videos.  American History was bad enough; except for Revolution, Civil War, and WWII, a lot of American History gets glossed over in schools.  It’s taken me four years graduated from college to finally learn what the Vietnam War was all about.  It’s one of those subjects people who lived in that time get hugely passionate about and it sure makes a huge conflict in movies like Forrest Gump, but is it explained to the next generation what was going on?  Fat chance.

Bad as that was, though, it was the European History that pissed me off.  So far, all Khan has covered is France from the First Revolution until just after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.  This is one of the most colorful, dynamic, tumultuous and bloodiest periods of time we’ve had in the last couple hundred years.  And the impact France has had on Europe and both the American continents is not to be sniffed at.

Take the Louisiana Purchase.  I have only been taught about the American side of events, how it was a brilliant move on Jefferson’s part to buy all that land so cheaply.  Turns out that it might have been an even more brilliant move on Napoleon’s part.  France was poor, its navy demolished, and really there was little to keep other nations from just conquering Louisiana on their own initiative.  Instead, Napoleon managed to get money from land that was out of his reach anyways.

In fact, Napoleon could very well have been the catalyst for Spanish-held America to revolt just by his conquering Madrid when expanding his own empire.  The whole history is just fascinating and I’m eager to see more of these new films.  And actually learn what I should have years ago.