Khan Academy: Fractional Reserve Banking

As someone who makes part of his living from explaining to other people how various aspects of the banking industry work, I am a very worried man; because I have just discovered the Khan Academy.

The conceptual idea behind the Khan Academy is eventually going to put everyone like me out of a job and roll forward 2,000 years of educational stasis, in a people-intensive industry which discovered how to teach children in ancient Athens and has stuck with the same resource-hogging methodology ever since.  Soon, you will no longer need to hire someone like me to explain something; you will just need to log on to the Khan Academy, for free, and have a brilliant down-to-earth polymath like Salman Khan explain it to you, instead.

With over 2,000 YouTube educational videos already to his name, and counting, Salman Khan’s educational methodology will empower the next generation of children to start throwing away the current teaching system, with all of its legions of government-mandated teachers and professors, thereby confirming the Rothbardian maxim that the intrinsic need of human society for intellectuals really is over-stated; particularly by the intellectuals.

My admittedly late discovery of the Khan Academy makes me ask the immediate question: “Do we really need a large government building in every district of the country, filled with taxpayer-supported employees, to indoctrinate our children with government-mandated thinking?  Is there a better way instead?”

Log on to the Khan Academy and discover that potentially better way, especially if you make your living from face-to-face teaching, because this web site and its imitators are going to blow your career away; you really need to start looking for something else to do. In 10 or 20 years, or possibly even sooner, everything is going to be different, and the only thing which will briefly keep you going, before it too is blown away, is current government control of the academic credentials system.

Once employers accept a Khan Degree in preference to a state-licensed degree — and they will — I’m afraid you’re going to be right behind me in the dole queue.

Take for instance the Khan Academy’s video thread on banking and money, especially Mr Khan’s three commentary lectures on Fractional Reserve Banking. These videos tells you everything you need to know about the FRB system in just three 20-minute YouTube video slots — especially the final part of the third video.  Formerly, the acquisition of this kind of knowledge would have taken up the better part of a one-month module in a three-year part-time MBA programme.

A second question professional educators need to ask themselves is this: “Will taxpayers, students, and parents continue to hand over large portions of their incomes and long years of their lives, to continue fraternising your politically-correct mind shops — thereby giving you interesting things to do in a comfortable environment — when they can secure for themselves a better education online, in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost?”

My entirely disinterested answer is, of course: “Yes, there’s nothing a child needs more than 12 years in an elementary school being bullied into correct thinking by other students and teachers, followed by a hugely expensive three-year party held at a government-funded university, to fulfil their enshrined lives.  Indeed, it is their God-given right to follow this pre-ordained holy pathway of socially-engineered enlightenment.”

Therefore, as the newly-installed chief shop steward and life president of the “We Will Always Need Physical Lecturers in the Room With Students, Oh Yes, How Dare You Suggest Otherwise” union, I hereby forbid you to watch these three diabolical videos, on pain of ex-communication from the Church of Social Justice: