An Apple a Day Should Keep the Student Away

Several years ago we were looking for a school for our daughter in New York. For any of you that don’t live in New York I don’t mean to belittle your choices, but to be honest I can’t imagine any place in the country quite as confusing where schooling is concerned as New York. There are a range of religious schools, but for many reasons these are out of the question for me. More reasonable, yet mind-blowingly expensive, are the myriad of private schools, and even free public schools, which are not in any way created equally.  For instance my 7-year-old goes to a public school where half of the day is taught in French. There were many memorable visits, but the school I was most impressed with was an Upper West Side private school that was very nice. It had high student to teacher ratios (which I no longer care about by the way), nice carpeting, smart boards, musical instruments for everyone, and something that I was impressed with at the time; a laptop for every child. What better way to be in touch with 21rst century education than with having a laptop in the hands of every child? Then my wife made a wonderful point that I couldn’t believe a lifetime PC user like me didn’t notice. She said “they are all Macbooks. The school is training kids to be users and consumers, not creators”. She was completely right. There is nothing wrong with an Apple product, but they are designed to put the user interface of an application ahead of creativity itself. This is even truer of IPADS which are all about buying then using, rather than content creation.  If this concerns you it is another reason to read the book Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff which I recommend several times in these blogs.

I don’t know the answer for what should be provided, but the Negroponte one laptop per child is a much better solution, as using a scripting language is a key feature. For students with these laptops, logic is more important than application. What did occur to me is that computers have become somewhat mysterious so that many of the basic functions of them are not understood by many of us. I touched on this in my blog here, but there is a larger societal issue beyond just technological literacy at play. It is about the ability to comprehend then use our technology to understand the global network that we are all a part of.  An easy example of this to imagine is a high schooler who has a Gmail account. How much thought does that teenager give to what is stored on his device versus what is stored in the cloud? And even if he does realize that the Cloud is where most of the important information of his life exists, is there any understanding of how bits are distributed and reconfigured at various server farms? If there is, which I highly doubt, then is there an understanding of the economics behind those corporations and the financial goal of having control over all of that information? This is all without even discussing coding and creation of content, but let’s make the crazy assumption that the teenager does know the financial model of Google, the distribution channels of e-mails, and the location of the servers where that information is stored. If that well informed kid wants to change the system in any way, even just for himself he then needs to know a little bit about programming.  Let’s say the kid doesn’t mind that system, and accepts it for most things. Then let’s say he wants to create videos that are cloud-based and created through an open source community. What if he doesn’t have the money to buy the Apple product called Final Cut Pro, or just doesn’t want to, and I-Movie that comes with the laptop just doesn’t do enough.  He could use open source free software. If he really has ideas, in addition to using he can both create his videos and then actually learn enough programming to contribute to the open source project that he has been lucky enough to utilize. He has now taken the first step to becoming a programmer. Even if he decides that the open source movement is not the most efficient way to create software or value, he can do it on his own, and create products himself. He will be one of his generation to make things better, rather than just accept what is already there.

Would any of this story be true in the fancy private school with the free Macbooks? It all could be, but I don’t think it would be. The bundled Mac, with I-Movie, I-tunes and Garage Band make it all too tempting for all of us to benefit from the great design of the present. There is nothing wrong with this, except that education is meant to inspire critical thinkers who will design the future. Even if this fictional kid did go outside of the Apple universe and do those things with his Macbook, he wouldn’t be able to go much further, with no room for microcontrollers, expansion etc. Apple has always had a reputation for locking in the user. Let’s make sure we don’t lock in our kids.