Good interview of Sal Khan and Reed Hastings by Vanity Fair (Scroll down to the video at the end.) Lots of good thoughts from both Sal and Reed. Here's one from Sal (about 2/3 into the video):
Regardless of your starting point, regardless of how quickly you may be able to process something initially, that most people who get to a high degree of success, it's usually because of this growth mindset. They're doing a lot of struggle, a lot of effort, they're embracing failure on a regular basis, and that's what's allowing them to succeed. Sure, I could have practiced basketball everyday, and I wouldn't be LeBron. That's just a reality of the world. But I would be a lot better. And it's hard to say who's going to get to that point. And you know there's a lot of even in our society and i think our Prussian model of school kind of reinforces this, we associate the ideas of slower and dumber together because it's like if you can't keep up with the assembly line, okay you're just going to be tracked someplace else. But there's actually starting to be a lot of research even that people who read slower, who process slower, actually get a much deeper understanding and if you kind of give them the time to process, they are more likely to be able to make significant connections in an idea. One example I give right now, you know, math, science, engineering, these are intensely creative fields. But they don't feel creative because, you know, the way we assess students right now in this domain is like if you were to assess future painters based on how well you mix paint, or future dancers based on how flexible they are, that's the same thing, to assess someone's mathematical creative ability based on how well they can factor a polynomial and how fast they can do it when they are twelve.
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