If only we'd put Steve Jobs in charge of education...

Instapundit linked this observation about the late Steve Jobs and his impact on technology.

That old Motorola cinderblock would cost about $10,000 in 2011 dollars, and you couldn't play Angry Birds on it or watch Fox News or trade a stock. Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy.

Indeed. There is no incentive for government to be competitive. They get paid whether your child graduates and goes on to Harvard or he joins a gang and gets killed in a drive-by. Can you imagine an iPhone designed by the teachers union?

I once had a frustrating conversation with a die-hard, yet clueless liberal. She was gushing profusely about a grant some failing inner city schools had received to purchase a computer for each kid. I said, what good are computers if the kids can't read? "But it's technology!" was her response. "Kids need access to technology!" Uh, but how will it help if they can't read? Wouldn't that money be better spent on some McGuffy Readers and a bunch of competent teachers? "No!" was her emphatic response. "Kids need technology and that's that."

It's the shiny object theory of education. Give 'em the coolest doodads and they'll learn by osmosis. But technology for technology's sake doesn't work. Just ask the Microsoft Zune.

Steve Jobs had a vision, and that's what made Apple's products succeed. The technological wizardry is actually secondary. Sure it's cool, but what makes it cool is the utility that we derive from it, a utility that he was able to imagine before we even knew that we needed it.

There are no visionaries like Steve Jobs in our public schools. They're all a bunch of fad-followers, the Microsoft Zunes of the education set. True innovation, when it rarely manages to emerge, is immediately stifled. (Last year in a nearby district the New Jersey Teacher of the Year was laid off due to budget cuts; she lacked the necessary seniority and that's the only criteria the teachers union cares about.)

Government protects the status quo. It doesn't create. It doesn't innovate. It certainly doesn't "succeed" by any reasonable measure of that term. But Steve Jobs did all three, and he did them better than almost anyone else.

An iPhone designed by the teachers union? No thanks. But if you think about it for a minute, that's exactly what your kids are getting every day when they trudge off to sit through another round of socialist-anarcho-marxist-enviro-awareness-raising-everybody-gets-a-trophy indoctrination at the hands of government employees who'd run screaming in terror if another Steve Jobs came along to upset their union-featherbedded apple carts.

Posted at 10:16 by Chris Wysocki   [/education]   Comments | Perm Link |
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