'What's Wrong With Education Cannot Be Fixed with Technology' -- The Other Steve Jobs

On Thursday, Apple is hosting an "Education Event" in New York City. Thanks to reporting by sister publication Ars Technica, we expect Apple to announce a new digital publishing tool – a "GarageBand for e-books" – to create interactive, HTML5-based texts that can be read on Apple's iOS devices.

However, Apple will still face some serious non-technological hurdles before it can make a serious impact on education and the textbook market. Just how many will depend on what else is announced on Thursday.

Apple's interest in textbook publishing was tipped last fall by Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs. On Feb. 24, 2011 (Jobs' 56th birthday), the subject comes up over dinner with News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch:

Most of the dinner conversation was about education. Murdoch had just hired Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to start a digital curriculum division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education. But Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials.

In fact, Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. "The iPad would solve that," he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. "The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt," he said. "But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money."

There is a lot to unpack here: whether Apple would work with textbook publishers or work directly with authors, if the initiative would be focused on K-12 education or extend to colleges and universities, and whether books would be sold or given away to route around educational bureaucracy – and ultimately, if Jobs is really discussing Apple's plans or simply sparking off ideas about what in a perfect world, he would like to do in educational publishing. These are questions that should be answered at Thursday's event.

For now, let's stay with that aside by Murdoch – that Jobs was "somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education." Not only is this absolutely true, but it plays a large role in explaining why Jobs had long been interested in creating something like a GarageBand for education.

In a 1996 interview with Wired, Jobs explains his position:

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy.

After discussing his daughter's private school, Jobs then imagines education re-aligned along the model of Silicon Valley startups:

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They'd do it because they'd be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don't learn until you're older – yet you could learn them when you're younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can't do it today. You'd be crazy to work in a school today. You don't get to do what you want. You don't get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school – none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education.

This, then, isn't just an flashy multimedia textbook, but using self publishing as an end-around to the dominance of board-approved textbooks. Otherwise, the only difference between Jobs in 1996 and Jobs in 2011 is his political target: state curriculum boards instead of teachers' unions. This is either more or less palatable, depending on your politics.

There's also potentially a sense that the sociopolitical problems preventing the genuine transformation of education don't matter quite so much if Apple can still find a way to carve out a decent business for itself.

The trouble is that education's sociopolitical problems – its bureaucracies, its stakeholders, its poverty, as well as the sheer mass of the industry – are exactly what makes building a disruptive business around education so difficult.

Let's take just one stakeholder example: students with disabilities, as well as their teachers and parents. Autism advocate and software developer Russ Ewell from the Hope Technology Group is excited. "Apple could unlock another door for autism with this breakthrough," Ewell said. "Parents could create social story books." So could special education teachers or therapists, tailored for each student.

On the same issue, special education policy researcher Sherman Dorn sees landmines. "Section 508 [of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act] (accessibility) complicates text GarageBand utopian visions," Dorn says. Section 508 mandates that all electronic and information technology used by the federal government be equally accessible to users with disabilities. "We've been told multimedia requires captioning, scripts, etc.," to meet the standards set by section 508, says Dorn. "Very labor-intensive."

Meanwhile, section 504 of the same act holds that every program or activity receiving federal financial assistance likewise has to provide equal access to people of all abilities. That's pretty much every college and university, as well as public K-12 schools.

In 2010, the Departments of Justice and Education wrote a letter admonishing colleges requiring the use of e-readers to be certain that those e-readers were accessible by blind students. At the time, no e-reader on the market was – except Apple's still-new iPad, thanks to its VoiceOver screen-reading software.

These are the kinds of issues publishers of electronic textbooks have to address. These are the reasons the barriers to entry are so large. How will Apple route around them – or rise to meet them?

Since the publication of Isaacson's biography, readers have seen Jobs the visionary, Jobs the jerk, Jobs the gleaner of others' technologies, and Jobs the editor of his own devices. What's usually missed, and what is so triumphantly on display in his 1996 Wired interview, is Jobs the pessimist.

Jobs was brilliant at identifying problems and knowing when there might be a solution Apple might provide – and knowing when the problems were such that there would never be a way out.

Nevertheless, he was equally brilliant at knowing when his pessimism had been proven wrong. After all, in 2008, he famously panned Amazon's Kindle: "The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read any more." Now that Amazon is one of Apple's top competitors, Apple knows that despite its problems, publishing and education are still worth taking seriously.