Steve Jobs- The True Education Visionary

Education is important for every nation. Talking about the education reformation, mostly there are two type of camps who are really interested in it. One is who want to improve the existing mass compulsory schooling system through tweaking and tuning and the other is the one who want to build something which is new, different and beneficial. Undoubtedly the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was a part of the ‘think different’ camp who stood up for school choice and vouchers. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Bill Gates has supported the Common Core State Standards and other incremental reforms within the conventional mass schooling model. Steve Jobs provided his support for vouchers and entrepreneurial educators.

He believed that vouchers have always been the only one piece of the education transformation puzzle and realized that power structures and bureaucratic tendencies inherent in conventional schooling did not let the incremental approach reform the existing mass schooling model does not work. In the Smithsonian interview, Steve Jobs said “I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they can easily get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there, of course, is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It takes the shape of bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened over time. The teachers are unable to teach and the administrators run the place and no one can be fired. It's absolutely terrible. The vastly different education policy approaches depicted by Gates and Jobs are a reflection of their own childhood schooling experiences. This different education policy approaches favored by Gates and Jobs is expectedly due in part to their own childhood schooling experiences. Once Gates attended a private day school, Lakeside School, in Seattle, Washington, and said in 2005: “Lakeside was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” On the other hand Jobs did not have a favorable reaction to his public schooling. He stated that school was indeed very hard for him at the beginning. His mother taught him how to read before he joined school and so when he got there he really just wanted to do two things. He wanted to read books because he loved reading books and he wished to go outside and catch hold of the butterflies. Like any five year old, he also had his own set of wishes. He encountered authority of a different kind than he had ever encountered before, and he did not like it. And they really almost got him. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of him.  As known, Steve and Gates both dropped out of college to start their own successful businesses. But their say on the K-12 education policy shows various differences to symbolize their respective companies.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://fee.org/articles/why-steve-jobs-not-bill-gates-was-the-true-education-visionary/