Steve Levitt

make a dent in the way that we teach and change education, that would really feel like I did something.

No, it wasn't in me at all.

And the first hint of it came when I did that guest spot on Freakonomics Radio and we talked about math education.

And that was just a lark.

I was just doing that because I was angry because I thought that my kids were suffering so much.

The response to it

kindled a little bit of a spark, but it was really on my podcast talking with Sal Khan.

And Sal Khan is the first person who introduced me to what's called mastery learning.

It's just the idea that the model of how we teach kids in a classroom with a teacher and 30 kids all being taught the same thing

And then moving on to the next topic as soon as that one's over and ignoring whether the kid has learned it or whether the kid already knows it.

It's just a terribly inefficient way of doing things.

And once Sal Khan told me about mastery learning and showed me the data, which is really shocking how much faster kids can learn, suddenly it changes the way you think about education because if you can actually do mastery learning, you free up

three or four hours in a school day that you can spend however you want with the kids.

And then it becomes this flood of imagination about what do you do with the kids that will change their lives, that will get them engaged with the learning.

So that's when the spark came.

And still it was kind of just a spark.

This is during COVID, and I tried to encourage Sal Khan to start an online school.

And so I kept on emailing him over and over saying, hey, we should start an online school.

We should start an online school.

And then maybe the 10th time I wrote to him,