20% Time

Many of you have probably heard of Google's 20% time.  For those of you that haven't, here is the basic premise.  For 20% of your work day, you can do whatever you want, be it a group project or just by yourself.  It's a chance to be creative and to show what you can do with your own initiative.  It's been hugely successful, spawning many of Google's core products like Gmail and Google AdSense.

This same approach, I think, would be hugely successful in education.  Give students one class in which they can study anything they want.  Have them layout an education plan to be approved by a teacher, or have dozens of pre-approved paths that can be developed as time goes on, there are many ways to go about it.  The key is to give more choice to the students about what they learn.  Perhaps 20% is too much to ask for, but I would argue that at least 10% of a student's time devoted to something that they are undoubtedly interested in, would be quite valuable.

Many companies have been quite successful with this model, and I think it would be worth giving it a shot with kids in K-12.