Steve Jobs, Technology and Education

The late Steve Jobs of Apple was not smart in the conventional sense. Instead, as his biographer Walter Isaacson tells us in the bestseller “Steve Jobs,” he was a genius. “His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical.”

One of the toughest problems America faces today is in education. Assessing the impact of technology in raising the quality of K-14 education has become a particularly thorny issue, considering that the future of the nation, and billions of dollars, are at stake

It is instructive to consider Jobs’ view on this. Unique among his peers, he positioned himself at the intersection of science and humanities and showed time and again that his gut feeling – intuition – was right in the products he envisioned and helped create.

Jobs didn’t think of technology as the silver bullet of education. As Isaacson points out, he was “somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education.” The ability to focus, think through problems and solve them requires patience, perseverance and hard work, qualities that technology is unlikely to foster.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates, on the other hand, and with whom Jobs had a contentious professional relationship, has more faith in the power of technology to transform education. His foundation has spent billions of dollars equipping classrooms across the country with state-of-the-art technology. As Gates sees it, it is a crucial innovation to use interactive technology to deliver high-quality materials for teachers and students. He feels that software can be used to tailor lessons for individual students so that they do not waste time on the things they already know and focus on areas they do not. “That's the kind of innovation that can lead to a brighter future for everyone,” says Gates.

Well, we have had over a decade of technology in classrooms – laptops, big interactive screens, software – in school districts from California and Arizona to New York and Maine. Analysis of the vast amount of data collected shows that, so far at least, Jobs’ view is holding out. Despite the extensive presence of technology in the school curricula, test scores remain stubbornly stagnant in reading, math and science.

In contrast, consider the successful Waldorf School in Los Altos, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The school, attended by children of local high-tech executives, operates on the principle that computers and schools don’t mix. Computers, according to the school, constrain creative thinking, reduce human interaction and play havoc with attention spans. Students and their parents couldn’t be more in sync with the Waldorf objectives.

This, of course, does not mean that technology will disappear from the nation’s classrooms. If anything, there will be even more technology in the future. The Waldorf is probably an exception. What it does mean, however, is that we haven’t yet found the best way to use technology to take education to a higher level.

There was one area in education where Jobs had strong feelings. He wanted to blow away the harmful and monopolistic textbook business through digital learning materials. As Isaacson writes, the “textbook industry was $8 billion a year, ripe for digital destruction. That was the next business he wanted to transform. His method was iPad. He wanted to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad.” Jobs’ clearly saw that “the
process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt. But if we can make textbooks free, and they come with this iPad, then they don’t have to be certified.” What was left unsaid was that the relief it would provide to students – mental, financial, physical – would be incalculable.

A cynic might suggest that Jobs’ real goal was to make the iPad ubiquitous in the nation’s classrooms, like other Apple products. But they would be missing the point. Jobs understood that creating new textbooks by world-class authors offered the best chance to free the nation’s students from the unethical and destructive practices of textbook publishers. In spite of earnest recommendations by well-meaning educators, the textbook industry continues to become even more powerful and monopolistic. The digital versions of their bloated and confusing textbooks are offered mostly as options, adding to the already sky-high cost of education. Jobs had the right vision. Recall how he converted music exceutives to his point of view and what he did for music with the iPod. So, for textbooks, if the iPad was his preferred medium of delivery, in all fairness, could anyone object to that?

One wonders if Apple has leaders as bold, brash and intuitive as Jobs was, leaders who can “think different” and launch projects to turn America’s moribund school system around. If not, high-tech companies specializing in so-called “educational technology” will clean up on the billions of educational dollars available through federal grants and private foundations without making any difference whatsoever, even as thousands of teachers are laid off and school budgets shrink to disastrous levels

A Persistent and Visionary Entrepreneur

No one realized the confluence of technology, entertainment and design in digital products and transformed them into objects of desire more than Steve Jobs. The co-founder of Apple, who passed away at 56 from pancreatic cancer, will be remembered for his seminal contributions to technology with such products and entities as the Macintosh (1984), Pixar (1986), iMac (1998), Mac OS X (2000), iPod (2001), iTunes Store (2003), iPhone (2007), MacBook Air (2008), and iPad (2010). The list is long and unique and sets him apart from other tech innovators who were lucky to hit the bull’s eye with one or two products.

In technology, Jobs believed in revolution, not evolution. His obsession with the look and feel of a product down to the last excruciating detail often rubbed his underlings and executives the wrong way. He could be cruel with criticism and brutal in his appraisal of others. But in the end, everyone who worked for him and was influenced by him became his fierce acolytes. When relentless excellence is the goal, walking on eggshells is not a priority.

Jobs was an anomaly in that he extolled the value of a liberal arts education when only STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) were (and are) held up as the gateway to employability. Before dropping out of college at 17, the only course he found satisfying was one on calligraphy, an experience he later used in creating graceful fonts for the Macintosh.

Jobs was neither a software nor a hardware engineer but he was the quintessential catalyst who made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. He created products from the user’s perspective, not the geek’s or the executive’s. The mouse, the user interface, the built-in network, the playful and friendly computers, these innovations and more were designed with you and me in mind. He made the computer truly personal.

All these raise an intriguing question: Where did this unique synthesis of art and science come from? Perhaps the clue lies in genealogy, although the story is suffused with sadness.

Steven Paul Jobs was born out of wedlock to a 23-year-old Syrian Muslim immigrant from Wisconsin named Abdul Fattah Jandali and his 23-year-old German-American girlfriend named Joanne Schieble. In the conservative America of 1955, the baby didn’t stand a chance of growing up with his biological parents, particularly considering that his mother came from an ultra-orthodox Christian family.

Joanne Schieble couldn’t convince her parents of marrying an Arab Muslim and so moved to liberal San Francisco. Although the couple formally married later, Joanne put up the baby for adoption without letting Jandali know about it.

The Arab-American boy was adopted by an American-Armenian family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Clara Hagopian and her husband Paul Jobs had been married for seven years. She was incapable of conceiving, so the couple eagerly adopted the baby who was to change the world in unimaginable ways.

Jobs never showed any interest in knowing his biological father. In August of 2011, Jandali, now 80 and a vice-president of a Casino in Reno, Nevada, (he has said that he is not a practicing Muslim but that he is proud of his Islamic heritage) publicly reached out to his son, saying, “I live in the hope that before it is too late he will reach out to me. Even to have just one cup of coffee with him just once will make me a very happy man.”

While there was no reconciliation, is it not possible that the confluence of the East and the West played a decisive role in shaping Jobs into who he was? The keen eye for aesthetics, the flair for technology, the uncanny ability to sense the potential in people and mold them into a never-ending source of creativity, probably came from this mix of two distinct bloodstreams.

Technology has a way of making today’s hottest products obsolete tomorrow. A new Jobs may appear out of the blue to create products that make the iPhones and the iPads look positively arcane.

But even if the digital revolution that Jobs spawned is supplanted by another, there is something else that he produced, or rather wrote, that I believe will stand the test of time. It is the commencement speech that he delivered at Stanford University in 2005.

It is among the most stirring and inspiring addresses ever, dealing with the fragility of life, the power of persistence, the elixir of creativity, and the inevitability of death. Everyone I know who has read it has been profoundly moved by it and resolved to make something of their lives.

“Your time is limited,” he said in conclusion in that address, “so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinion drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs lived his own life. He moved confidently in the direction of his dreams and passions, relentlessly focused on his goals while never letting failures (and he had quite a few) daunt him. There are lessons in it for all.