Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

I flip through the newspaper and notice an article about a meeting between the CEOs and founders of huge technology firms and governors of various states.  The goal was for these corporate leaders to instruct the politicians about how schools need to change.  At first, this seems like an arrogant move.  After all, I would not tell Google how to change their logarithms with their search engine.  The CEO of Google commented that America's education was bankrupting our youth and that they were forced to seek talent from India. Their hypothesis: standards are too low. 

I set the paper down for a moment and ponder the first assertion, that the system is broken.  I find that odd, considering the founders of Microsoft, Apple and Google all lived in milddle class America and attended public schools - at least by the high school level.  Morover, despite all the talk of how we have dropped our standards, in my high school, a quarter of all students finished AP Calculus.  Every student finished four years of high school.  By comparison, when my dad was in high school, the requirement was two years of math - Algebra and Geometry.  Really bright students could take Trig.  Is it possible that the reason so many new engineers are from India is that India has a massive population, a booming new economy and a deep desire among its youth to have what their parents were not able to achieve?

The second assertion seems misguided.  Education does not need higher standards, or more of the same standardized system.  Instead, it needs to abandoned aspects of standardized education in replace of a more authentic model.  Consider the google guys, Sergey and Brin.  In their case, both attended a Montessori school in early childhood that allowed them to explore math with passion. Where the system failed them (and still fails students) was by keeping all students at the same level, never allowing them to explore independently and doing little to show how math and science are used in the real world.  Thus, both men recieved that informal, authentic education on their own time. 

If we disregard the solutions proposed by the Google guys and instead consider their own life story, it would seem that what is needed is more authentic learning experiences, more higher level thinking, more of a connection to the outside world, more parental support and a message that math and science can be interesting and relevant to life.  Perhaps instead of listening to the rhetoric of "higher standards," we could consider the googleplex itself, where the company culture is fun, creative and challenging and where, one day a week, all employees can work on an independent project of personal interest.