What if schools treated students like Google treats it engineers?

Maybe we're trying too hard to make education meaningful, when people left to their own devices will naturally seek to learn things that are meaningful to them. I know, I know.. state-mandated testing means there are a lot of things we HAVE to teach, whether they're meaningful to students or not. But perhaps, by adopting the model of Google Corporation, public schools could still manage to teach the arbitrary core curriculum while it also creates and empowers learners.

Google is well known among job-seekers for its incredible perks. You can get a taste of some of what they offer by watching this video clip, originally aired on Oprah. Google employees generally, and engineers especially, enjoy an amazing array of distilled love from their employer: free meals, on-site health care, generous vacation time, shuttle service, and intramural athletics, to name just a few. These benefits combine to encourage employees to work harder, longer, and better because they want to, not because they have to. Of course, it all helps to attract and retain top-notch employees, too.

One particularly cool benefit for engineers is "20 percent time." They must use 20% of their work week to develop projects and follow passions that were not assigned to them by their superiors. What a cool idea to increase motivation and produce some outside-the-box innovation. Google's co-founders credit their own experience in Montessori programs with giving them the idea for 20 percent time. Montessori, as you probably know, is a philosophy with some radical premises (according to Wikipedia):

- A view of children as competent beings capable of self-directed learning.
- That children learn in a distinctly different way from adults.
- The ultimate importance of observation of the child interacting with her or his environment as the basis for ongoing curriculum development. Presentation of subsequent exercises for skill development and information accumulation are based on the teacher's observation that the child has mastered the current exercise(s).
- Delineation of sensitive periods of development, during which a child's mind is particularly open to learning specific skills or knowledge, including language development, sensorial experimentation and refinement, and various levels of social interaction.
- A belief in the "absorbent mind", that children from birth to around age 6 possess limitless motivation to achieve competence within their environment and to perfect skills and understandings. This phenomenon is characterized by the young child's capacity for repetition of activities within sensitive period categories, such as exhaustive babbling as language practice leading to language competence.
- That children are masters of their environment, which has been specifically prepared for them to be academic, comfortable, and allow a maximum amount of independence.
- That children learn through discovery, so didactic materials that are self-correcting are used as much as possible.

Montessori is still around, and though it's used mostly with preschool kids, there are a few schools that use the method with older students too. But I digress.

Could schools reshape themselves in Google's mold, in small and big ways, to see student performance improve? I can picture a school with a campus that is open most of the day, where students must be there for a certain number of hours but are welcome to stay much longer. Students are engaged in a variety of activities, and rather than building their instructional day around arbitrary blocks of time, it is built around students meeting objectives in various subjects. Students would have more access to sports and healthy snacks throughout the day as they felt they needed them. To ensure that kids aren't just wasting time, students would check in with an advisor regularly who monitors their progress and their time management. A cornerstone of this "Google-ization" of education could be the implementation of "20 percent time," where students were encouraged to innovate and explore for a significant part of their day.

Maybe, just maybe, a scheme like this would help us meet objective-based standards while we also nourish a love of learning rather than killing it. And who knows, maybe this would help us attract and retain high-performing kids and families in public schools, too.