DanTranimal

Education was on Steve Jobs’ Mind Towards the End of His Life

Posted on the November 14th, 2011 under Education by dantranimal

While I thoroughly enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s detailed biography on Steve Jobs, most of the book’s recounted stories expounded upon what we already know about him through anecdotes and interviews. What piqued my interest, however, were the last few chapters, where we get to glimpse what Steve Jobs would have focused on if he had more time to make another “dent in the universe”.

Even though Steve Jobs had precious little energy and time left, he spent a surprising amount of both thinking and talking about education. On his first meeting with Barack Obama, Jobs lectured the President on how to run the country, emphasizing the importance of eliminating the bureaucratic barriers to improving our education system. Moreover, Jobs recognized the need to replace our out-dated lecture-based teaching with more real-time interactivity and personalization.

The meeting actually lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. “You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.

Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.

Recognizing his time was nearing the end, Steve Jobs meets with Bill Gates for the last time. Once again, education was on Steve Jobs’ mind as he wonders how his friend and former-adversary would approach education.

They spent more than three hours together, just the two of them, reminiscing. “We were like the old guys in the industry looking back,” Jobs recalled. “He was happier than I’ve ever seen him, and I kept thinking how healthy he looked.” Gates was similarly struck by how Jobs, though scarily gaunt, had more energy than he expected. He was open about his health problems and, at least that day, feeling optimistic. His sequential regimens of targeted drug treatments, he told Gates, were like “jumping from one lily pad to another,” trying to stay a step ahead of the cancer.

Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools—far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said, computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback.