Salman Khan Returns to MIT, Gives Commencement Speech, Likens School to Hogwarts

This week, Salman Khan returned to his alma mater, MIT, to deliv­er the com­mence­ment speech to the 2012 grad­u­ates. As you know, MIT helped spark the open edu­ca­tion move­ment when it launched its Open­Course­Ware site in 2002. A decade lat­er, the uni­ver­si­ty has placed mate­ri­als for 2100 cours­es online (find many high­light­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es). So it’s fit­ting that the new face of open edu­ca­tion would deliv­er the big speech.

The talk is a bit inward­ly focused, a cel­e­bra­tion of MIT and its Hog­warts qual­i­ties. But the lat­ter half gets to Khan’s phi­los­o­phy of life, his recipe for liv­ing well in the world. It boils down to 1) being pos­i­tive and smil­ing when in doubt, 2) sur­ren­der­ing your ego dur­ing times of con­flict, 3) lis­ten­ing to oth­ers, 4) down­play­ing mate­r­i­al con­cerns and focus­ing on health and rela­tion­ships, and 5) using a num­ber of thought exper­i­ments to gain per­spec­tive on life. Those he explains along the way.…