Sal's back to school 2021 message

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy.

We're entering into yet another back to school, but this is a back to school that's very unusual compared to all others. We hope that we're finally going to get to some level of normalcy as we see the light at the end of the tunnel with the pandemic, at least in some places. I know a lot of parts of the world are still going through some of the worst impacts of the pandemic.

But as we hopefully get to that point and go back to school, I just wanted to say how excited we are to partner with y'all. The pandemic has been tough; it's been tough on many dimensions of our life, but especially education. As I always say, and people are surprised to hear it from me, if I had to pick between an amazing in-person experience with an amazing educator versus the best technology in the world, I would pick the amazing in-person experience.

Now, I don't think there has to be a trade-off; I think the best is the best of both worlds. But you could imagine people haven't had the benefit of being in the room together, being able to have all of the intangibles that go with being an in-person school. So, there's a lot of work to do.

Obviously, all of us here at Khan Academy have been doing our best to play a part in keeping everyone learning, supporting everyone as the pandemic went on. But the real work is actually going to be now as we go into back to school. A lot of folks have been talking about unfinished learning or learning loss.

Every summer, there's some learning loss; kids forget things and they're not learning things. But we can imagine with a year, year and a half of pandemic schooling, some of the kids who we are most concerned about actually fell off the radar. Many, many other kids weren't able to learn as much, and even the kids, and the learners I should say, of all ages who were able to learn, there are other things that fell by the wayside: the socialization, the connection, the patterns of school.

So for all of you parents, students, teachers, donors to Khan Academy, first of all, thank you for being on this journey with us. But I'm confident as well that as we go into this period, it's not going to be easy. But if we work together to figure out ways to finish that unfinished learning, there might be a post-pandemic world where we can accelerate learning together faster than ever.

So, I look forward to going on that journey and welcome back to school!