Scott McNealy is one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and a big proponent of something called open source education. I am on board with what he says. His public education philosophy tracks closely with mine. He explains the whole concept of open source education materials and what he has done about it here:

Here is a link to the Curriki, the free K-12 curricula and resource website he describes in the video.

What brought this back to my radar was a link my friend Andrew sent me to an online video interview of McNealy. He said, “Discussion of education starts around 28:50.  Right at 31:55, he says a few words that I thought would really ring true for you.” Boy howdy was he right. I transcribed just a little bit of it here to give you the flavor McNealy’s remarks on education, part of which is about his ideas on education. I could not embed the video, but you can get to it by clicking here. I might note that he starts talking about education well before 28:50 and that is certainly worth a listen, too.

Interviewer: What is the state of the art right now? What’s going on in classes these days?

…

Scott McNealy: Monopoly is the wart.

Interviewer: In this case, the teachers union monopoly?

Scott McNealy: Who is the biggest monopolist out there? The government. So now we have the government sector union teachers driving the architecture, the process, all the rest of it. Meanwhile technology is going up, up and away.

There is much more in the video. McNealy talks about the concept of going to school, not to live one’s dream, but to get a job. The thing I really like about McNealy is that he put his money where his mouth was and did something about the whole educational mess in America. Our little family did it on a micro level by pulling our kids out of the traditional/government school morass while McNealy did it on an über-macro level and set up a system whereby every kid in America and around the world can benefit. Kudos to him!