Narrator: What if a character in a story you were writing suddenly started talking back to you? On New Year's Day in 2023, Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, sat down with his eleven-year-old daughter, Diya, to write a story. They created a character named Samantha, a sassy influencer stranded on a deserted island. As Diya typed, something extraordinary happened. The character, Samantha, began responding directly to them on the screen. "Hi Diya and Sal," she wrote, "this storytelling adventure you are writing is quite splendid!" The experience was mind-blowing, blurring the lines between author and creation, and it sparked a profound realization for Khan: education was about to change forever.

This pivotal moment is the starting point for his book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing). Khan argues that Artificial Intelligence, far from being a threat, holds the potential to solve some of education’s most persistent problems. He presents a vision where AI doesn't replace human connection but amplifies it, creating a more personalized, equitable, and inspiring learning experience for every child on the planet.

Narrator: For millennia, educators have known that one-on-one tutoring is the gold standard for learning. A personal tutor can adapt to a student's unique pace, address specific knowledge gaps, and provide encouragement precisely when it's needed. In the 1980s, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom quantified this effect with his "two-sigma problem." He found that students who received personalized tutoring performed two standard deviations better than those in a conventional classroom—a massive leap that could take an average student to the 96th percentile. The challenge, however, has always been scale. How can society provide a personal tutor for every child?

In Brave New Words, Sal Khan argues that AI is the key to finally solving this problem. He introduces Khanmigo, an AI tutor developed by Khan Academy, designed to replicate the Socratic, supportive nature of a human tutor. For instance, when a student is struggling with a polynomial problem, Khanmigo doesn’t just give the answer. Instead, it asks guiding questions like, "What do you think the first step is?" or "Can you tell me what the 'degree' of a term means?" If the student makes a mistake, the AI offers gentle correction and encouragement, adapting its approach in real time. By remembering a student’s interests, like a love for soccer, it can even frame algebra problems in a context that makes the material more engaging and relevant. This approach aims to make personalized, world-class tutoring accessible to everyone, finally addressing the two-sigma problem at a global scale.

Narrator: While AI’s potential in STEM fields is often highlighted, Khan shows how it can also revolutionize the humanities, transforming subjects like literature and history from static texts into living, interactive experiences. Traditional reading comprehension is often assessed with multiple-choice questions that fail to capture a deep understanding of a text's nuance and themes. This can make literature feel distant and unengaging for many students.

Khan illustrates a new possibility through the story of Saanvi, a ninth-grade student in India assigned to read The Great Gatsby. Stumped by a question about the symbolism of the green light, she turned to Khanmigo. Instead of searching for a dry analysis online, she initiated a conversation with an AI simulation of Jay Gatsby himself. "Ah, the green light," the AI Gatsby explained. "It is a symbol of my dreams and desires...it represents my yearning for the past and my hope to reunite with Daisy." This direct, immersive interaction gave Saanvi a profound and memorable understanding of the novel's core themes. The book argues that this capability—to converse with historical figures, debate literary characters, or even embody the Fourteenth Amendment—can ignite curiosity and foster a much deeper, more personal connection to the social sciences.

Narrator: A common fear surrounding AI in education is that it will replace human teachers. Khan directly refutes this, arguing that AI's true role is to augment teachers, not automate them. The modern teaching profession is in crisis, with staggering rates of burnout driven by overwhelming administrative workloads. Teachers spend countless hours on lesson planning, grading, and paperwork, which leaves less time for what they do best: connecting with and inspiring students.

The book positions AI as a tireless teaching assistant that handles the tedious work, freeing educators to focus on high-impact, human-centric activities. Khan provides a compelling example of a teacher using Khanmigo to create a lesson plan on World War II. In seconds, the AI generates a detailed, multi-day plan. When the teacher notes that their students are distracted by a recent World Series win, they ask the AI to adapt the lesson. The AI seamlessly weaves in the role of baseball during the war, suggesting discussions on players like Ted Williams who served in the military and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. By offloading the heavy lifting of content creation and administration, AI empowers teachers to become facilitators of rich, dynamic, and personalized classroom experiences.

Narrator: The rise of AI in education brings valid concerns about safety, misinformation, and data privacy. Khan confronts these issues head-on, proposing that a well-designed AI can act as a "guardian angel" for students online. In a world saturated with biased content, AI tutors can be programmed with strong guardrails. For example, if a student wants to debate the flat Earth theory, Khanmigo politely declines, stating that the Earth's shape is a scientifically established fact and then provides the evidence. This helps steer students away from rabbit holes of misinformation.

Simultaneously, AI can strengthen the connection between parents and children. The book describes how a parent can use Khanmigo to receive a summary of their child's academic activity. The AI might report that their daughter is struggling with slope calculations in algebra but also engaged in a thoughtful, simulated conversation with a character from The Scarlet Letter. The AI can then offer the parent coaching tips on how to best support their child. This transparency provides parents with specific, actionable insights, turning potential moments of conflict over homework into opportunities for connection and understanding, while still respecting the child's need for independence.

Narrator: The traditional pillars of college admissions—grades, standardized tests, and essays—are being fundamentally challenged by AI. Essays can be generated by AI, and standardized tests are often criticized as narrow and inequitable. Khan argues that this disruption forces a necessary re-evaluation of how we measure student potential and offers a chance to create a fairer system.

He points to the success of Schoolhouse.world, a nonprofit platform that provides a new form of credentialing. Students can earn certifications by demonstrating mastery of subjects on Khan Academy and by tutoring others. This dynamic transcript, which measures both academic competency and "soft skills" like leadership and empathy, is now being accepted by top universities like MIT, Yale, and the University of Chicago. AI can enhance this model further by providing feedback to tutors and even conducting scalable, consistent, and auditable interviews. This moves beyond a static, one-time snapshot of a student's ability and toward a more holistic, continuous, and transparent view of their knowledge and character.

Narrator: As AI transforms the workplace, the skills required for success are also shifting. The book addresses the anxiety this causes, exemplified by a Stanford computer science student who feared her newfound coding skills were already obsolete. Her professor reassured her that while AI can write individual pieces of code, the uniquely human skill lies in understanding how to integrate those pieces to build a complex, functional system.

Khan argues that the future belongs to those who can work in concert with AI. This requires both deep and broad skills. Students still need a strong foundation in core subjects, but they also need a wide-ranging understanding of history, art, and science to ask the right questions and guide AI effectively. The most valuable employees will be those who can leverage AI to enhance their productivity and creativity. This means education must shift from rote memorization toward fostering an entrepreneurial mindset—the ability to identify problems, research solutions, and synthesize information to create something new. AI, by handling the basics, can free up the educational time needed to cultivate this very human form of ingenuity.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Brave New Words is that the AI revolution in education is not ultimately about technology; it is about humanity. Sal Khan's vision is not one of classrooms run by robots, but one where AI liberates teachers from administrative burdens, empowers parents with deeper insights, and provides students with a personal guide for their curiosity. The goal is to use this powerful new tool to amplify what is most essential in learning: human connection, creativity, and the development of the whole person.

The book leaves us with a powerful challenge, encapsulated in Khan's call for "educated bravery." The path forward is not to ban AI out of fear, nor is it to adopt it without caution. Instead, we are called to engage with it thoughtfully, to build the necessary safeguards, and to courageously reimagine what is possible in education. The story of learning is being rewritten, and the most pressing question is not what AI will do to us, but what we will choose to do with it.