EdSurge:
People love to try guess what Apple is up to—that’s true for the company’s education strategy as well. But often there’s not much to go on beyond press releases and speculation.
So when Apple’s longtime vice-president of education, John Couch, published a book this year with his thoughts on the future of education and accounts of his work at Apple, it opened a rare window into the company’s views on education.
It offers some anecdotes about how Steve Jobs thought about computers in education, including how he referred to computers as an “amplifier for intellect” the same way a bicycle amplifies the physical push of the rider. In the book, Couch writes that Jobs predicted this mental bicycle would “allow us to go beyond—to discover, create and innovate like never before.”
But the book is also full of Couch’s frustration at the slow pace of change in schools. He argues that the machines Apple builds are still not being used to their full potential in education.
My wife works in the education system and she echoes a lot of this frustration.
It’s depressing. Teaching colleges are, by and large, doing well at preparing new teachers for embracing technology and STE(A)M and multimodal education. Any new teacher today should have a dozen better uses for classroom technology than PowerPoint.
But then they become the powerless new hire in education systems full of dug-in teachers and administrators and parents who want to pretend it’s 1972 in every possible way. (Which Couch understandably bemoans in the interview.)
I’ll be interested to read this.
Update: Couch talks a bit about teaching methods and the use of technology, but never addresses the core problem with American public education: that it has been steadily crippled by funding cuts for decades, from the federal level on down.
Instead, the push towards defunding another public service until it breaks, then pushing for privatization sidelines the scope of this conversation down to relative trivia. In that, the “slow pace of change” is proceeding steadily backwards towards the 19th century.
Yes, I know that public advocacy isn’t Apple’s role. But interviews like this aren’t about actual policy that applies to very many students. A once-great institution has been systematically degraded, and we’re left debating the best way to rearrange deck chairs.
Education is one of the least responsive industries in America… for nearly everything and in dire need of a competitive shakeup.
That said, I’m not convinced Apple’s more fragile and costly solutions are answering what schools need compared to cheap Chromebooks and G-Suite.
In America, the asshole conservatives have been dumbing down education with their fascist policy initiatives from being anti-science to trying to foist creationism into the discourse. Teachers have to buy their own darn pencils, and Apple wonders why there are no fancy tech devices in classrooms?