As told to Charlie Rose by Google’s Erich Schmidt:

Eric Schmidt:
And that’s how (Sun’s Bill Joy) learns. So rather than having a textbook, he starts with a search on an idea. The combination of Wikipedia, which is a remarkable achievement of humanity, just phenomenal, and search engines like Google, mean that you can literally get it all if you’re willing to be motivated. So my idea about school would be that you would sit there with however many students you have and you’d say students, I’m going to give you a set of search terms to get started with. And we’re going to see which of you learn the most. And what would happen, of course, is about a third, the ones in the back row that are asleep are going to wait for the other two-thirds. And out of the other two-thirds, some of them will do great, some will do poorly. Then you have a conversation among all of them. It’s a complete inversion of the textbook model. And, of course, you could supplement it for the textbook for the people who are uncomfortable or not creative in that regard.

Charlie Rose:
What you said is you could. Are these kinds of things being translated to the people on the front line of education, the teachers and the principles and the schools?

Eric Schmidt:
I’ve met educators who are doing this. I was giving you the extreme example. If most important accomplishment I’ve seen in education has been the development of these community sites around topic areas. Some of the best teachers in physics, chemistry, and so forth, get together and they put together lessons, ostensibly as an online lesson plan. But it’s really to get a compendium of information. And we have a lot of evidence that committed people, professionals like people here in the audience who work collaboratively across all the United States, produce an enormously valuable product. And that product can serve as the basis for the next revision of textbooks, the next revision of certification. And I think so it’s wonderful.

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