Google co-founder Sergey Brin wants more computers in schools

Sergey Brin. Credit: Google.

High school dropout Sergey Brin has a few ideas on how the educational system should be improved. Not surprisingly  from a guy who co-founded Google, where he still serves as president of technology and one of the company's three key decision-makers, a lot of those ideas center on computers.

"It's important for students to be put in touch with real-world problems," Brin said. "The curriculum should include computer science. Mathematics should include statistics. The curriculums should really adjust."

He advocated putting all textbooks on computers, to make for easier access, and for putting high school students to work -- writing Wikipedia articles, and teaching technology to senior citizens and middle school students. In teaching, they will learn.

Brin spoke today at a conference on Google's campus, Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age, which the tech company is co-hosting with Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. By and large, speakers passionately spoke of the advantages of equipping schools with the latest in digital technology, and of engaging students on their home turf -- computers.

Google has been relatively quiet in the field of education, but the company is starting to make a splash. For the last three years, it has given schools the premium version of its Google Apps, enabling schools to run their business and provide teachers with e-mail and other tools that it typically charges corporations for. In part, the giveaway helps advance Google's plan of...

...providing universal access to all the world's information; in part it helps prepare the workforce of tomorrow; and it also is indoctrinating that workforce with the Google brand.

"The kids who are in school are our future business leaders," said Cristin Frodella, product marketing manager for the Google Apps, Education Edition. "If they like Google Apps now, they'll ask for it by name. There is a value there."

The presence of Brin at the conference, as well as Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and company vice president Marissa Mayer, speaks volumes to the company's commitment to education, said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, an advocacy group. "It's a very positive symbolic role," Steyer said. "Google is serious about helping kids, particularly disadvantaged kids."

Brin, wearing some funky new Vibram FiveFingers shoes that fit the feet like a glove, told how his family enrolled him in a Montessori school from age 6 to 11, where he was able to explore his own interests in learning. "The school had an Apple II," said Brin, now 36. "When I was 9, my parents gave me a Commodore 64, which was fun. At the time, the opportunity to program your own computer was easier than it is today. Today there are significantly larger barriers because of the complexity built into computing."

After he left the Montessori school, Brin felt he was stuck in a 19th-century curriculum, and he ultimately quit high school after his junior year. He remains on leave from Stanford, where he was working on his doctorate when he and Larry Page hit upon the algorithm that led to Google, and turned them both into billionaires.

Brin had some other ideas for improving schools, most notably treating teachers better. His mother-in-law, Esther Wojcicki, who spoke at the conference, teaches English and journalism at Palo Alto High School, and many of his friends are teachers. "It's really a miserable job," he said. "They're not really paid a living wage."

Brin foresees computers getting cheaper and cheaper, and broadband access becoming more ubiquitous, which will make computers more a part of education than ever. A relatively new parent, Brin was asked by moderator James Bennet, editor of Atlantic magazine, what kind of technological world he envisions 15 or 20 years from now.

Brin said he hoped that the increasingly powerful access to information would free people up to become more capable individuals. But he did see a downside.

"When I was growing up, I always knew I'd be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence," he said. But now that studens can see beyond their own school or hometown, they see that "there are always going to be a million people better than you at times, or someone will always be far better than you. I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb."

-- Dan Fost

Comments

[rebecca]

I love that he was wearing FiveFingers!!! They looked so cool!

[Mary M.]

It's inappropriate to call Sergey Brin a "high school dropout" (your article's opening words), when, as the article later makes clear, he left high school because he was too smart for it! There is a real anti-intellectual streak in the U.S., and promoting the romance that someone can leave school and nonethless become a big success -- Bill Gates, too, was always trumpeted as a "dropout" -- is not helpful. Shouldn't Sergey Brin be held up as a model of what a child can get for loving learning and education and submitting oneself to it for a very long time?

[Lorraine Brooks]

I couldn't agree more! I am the principal of a high school that provides all students with laptops and what a difference this has made!

[Bob Lenz]

Sounds like Sergey and the Google team need to visit an Envision School right up the 101 in San Francisco and Oakland or across the 92 in Hayward. The schools Sergey envisions exist not more than 30 miles from Mountain View. Visit www.envisionschools.org to learn more.

[ken]

Sergey Brin, high school dropout? He's on more or less permanent leave from his doctoral thesis at Stanford, but I don't think that's quite the same thing.

[Danny Hile]

I don't think learning statistics is necessarily going to inspire children, nor is it a real world problem (I think it depends on the real world you are from).

74% of small business owners in Australia still do not have a presence on the internet and many of them are surviving. Real world problems for them involve learning english (not jargon and text talk) finance and one that we all seem to be forgetting -real life social skills.

And just one criticism about health... How many children are going to need glasses if they read all of their text books on a computer?

[Philip George]

High school dropout? He dropped out of Stanford's PhD programme

[sanfrandan]

With three people criticizing the "high school dropout" phrase, I want to note that first, I did include in the post that Brin is on leave from Stanford's Ph.D. program.

More importantly, I felt it was noteworthy that he dropped out of high school -- that the educational system was not meeting the needs of this obviously highly intelligent person. In many respects, that's gives him a more interesting platform from which he can critique the system.

While I don't agree with all of his ideas, I meant no disrespect in publicizing a fact that he himself pointed out from the stage.

[mj]

high school drop out???

[LL]

When you read "high school dropout" in the opening sentence without being familiar with the whole story, you might be inclined to think he dropped out to found Google and become a billionaire, not that he eventually went on to postgraduate study at Stanford.
That being said, I agree that as computers, especially laptops get cheaper and cheaper, as they have been for the last few years, they will become indispensable in education. For a comparison of some of the bestselling computers, check out: http://www.topfivecomputers.com/

[Jerry Boyd]

"Today there are significantly larger barriers because of the complexity built into computing."

I am 20, and wanted to be a programmer, but put it on hiatus as I was not sure which language to learn. I'm guessing in Sergey's days there was only assembly and basic. I really should be playing around with QBasic more often.

[Pen]

Perhaps if he'd not dropped out, he'd know it's curricula not curriculums?

[Jessi Stearn]

Brin is starting a great campaign with the idea of more schools in the classroom. High schoolers are always complaining about the work they have to do, asking, “how is this going to help me in the real world?” With his ideas of making learning more technologically based with an emphasis of teaching those younger students would be well prepared for the work they will do in future jobs. It is also a great strategy to get the leaders of tomorrow acquainted and used to Google applications and services.

[Jessi Stearn]

Brin is starting a great campaign with the idea of more schools in the classroom. High schoolers are always complaining about the work they have to do, asking, “how is this going to help me in the real world?” With his ideas of making learning more technologically based with an emphasis of teaching those younger students would be well prepared for the work they will do in future jobs. It is also a great strategy to get the leaders of tomorrow acquainted and used to Google applications and services.