Apple's School Days are Numbered

prostoalex writes "Business Week describes the current situation in the educational market, suggesting that Apple will lose its share among the high school teachers and students. The worst enemies, according to Business Week, are school superintendents. "We want a single platform," one of them said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it.""

Comments

Re:Why are students so passive - one story

[Troed]

I'll call PTA and the local newspaper and I'll sue the school too

... and become part of the [american] problem. It's BECAUSE you risk getting sued schools and teachers don't dare doing anything outside what's in the plans and books.

Something everyone is missing...

[evilviper]

I don't think anybody is thinking about this the right way at all... Teaching students how to use a computer (or a computer program) should not be a goal, in and of itself.

Teachers should be teaching their students how to create a spreadsheet, the fact that they are doing it with Excel should just be a footnote, and even the fact that they are using a computer to do it should not be a primary factor at all.

A better example: The goal of teaching students how to use iMovie should be to teach them how to edit movies... The software that they use to do it matters very little, the operating system matters very little, and even the fact that it is being done with a computer shouldn't matter much at all...

With that said, if teaching students how to edit video, create a spreadsheet, etc., is easier on a Mac than a PC, then why should a PC even be considered? Should I be forced to write with a #2 pencil just because everyone else does?

Learning Excel for the sake of learning Excel is the equivalent of high-tech masturbation. It's as if your only goal in life, is to have a goal in life... There is no sense to it at all in public schools.

The public school system is not a 13-year-long trade-school. The goal is education of an individual, not marketable corporate skills. Maybe that's one of the primary reasons the U.S. education system is FAILING. Instead of actually educating kids, they teach them to memorize and recite facts. The education system is in a poor state, and this idea of computer monoculture is a great example of the symptoms experienced by a school with a serious problem. It is likely a school where the administrators don't undertand what their jobs are, and students aren't actually being educated at all.

Even if we are to believe that schools legitimately wanted to provide students with experience on the systems used in corporations, and suspend logic to believe that it was a laudable goal, then we still run into the question of why are schools using Windows 98 instead of 2000? Win 98 certainly isn't popular in companies at all, so what's the point? Also, why are they locking down computers so tightly that students can't actually get any experience on computer, if that is really the goal? And why aren't they teaching any useful and valuable skills, instead of crap like Word and Excel?

I think uniformity, and "using what's used in corporations" is a red herring, and much of this comes down to simple payola, and other Microsoft lobbying efforts that convice educators that is might be reasonable.

Disclaimer: Much of this content comes from some of my replies to other comments. I thought the content was important enough that I should give it it's own thread, and more exposure on the main thread, rather than less-trafficed areas. Please moderate/reply to this one, and ignore the others.