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Education Businesses Apple

Apple's School Days are Numbered 674

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.""
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Apple's School Days are Numbered

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  • Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SilentEchos ( 696434 ) <(rahaha) (at) (earthlink.net)> on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:22AM (#6715667) Journal
    Apple was making a lot of money from the education, I don`t think they will lose it though. I know they are losing a lot of ground but in retrospect they have not been as actively persuing it as they have other markets. Perhaps Apple has a trick up its sleeve for schools. I know where I used to work there was a couple of die hard Apple fans in the tech departement that will now allow the school to be taken over by PCs. :D
    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

      by scrod ( 136965 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:41AM (#6715742) Homepage
      its not exactly dominant in the home or business world, why teach kids on it?

      If your kids can't figure out how to use a different operating system because its widgets are on the right side of the window, then they're pretty fucking stupid.
      • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

        by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:54AM (#6715770)
        If you want to really confuse an ms-windows user... drag their taskbar up to the top of the window... :)

        A fair percentage (like most of them) don't even know you can do little things like that. And if you really really want to be nasty... drag the top edge of the task bar so as to turn it into one that's only a few pixels thick as well...

      • by emil ( 695 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @07:40AM (#6716286)

        On one platform, you can:

        • Expose students to common Office applications
        • Use C, C++, and Objective-C compilers in a UNIX environment
        • Demonstrate a UNIX environment, with many of the applications that are in use by industry (Oracle, Apache, etc.)

        Thorough study of Mac OS X can land a student a $100k+ job. Thorough study of Microsoft platforms gets a student an MCSE and $8.50/hr.

        School administrators, do not cripple your students with Microsoft products.

  • by El ( 94934 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:22AM (#6715668)
    "We want a single platform." == "We want EVERY machine to be effected by any virus or worm that's going around." How 'bout doing some research first to see if supporting multiple platforms really does cost more?
    • by zangdesign ( 462534 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:29AM (#6715702) Journal
      But in education, diversity costs more. Not necessarily for the hardware or the software, but for the training necessary to teach students to work in it. Since Apple charges a premium price for their systems (worth it, IMHO), they automatically are shut out by cheaper Windows and Linux software solutions. And since the rest of the non-technical world has standardized on Windows (more or less), Linux is not a viable option either.

      That's reality. It's not necessarily right and good, but it is what is. You can fight to change it all you want, but the money's going to have to come from somewhere and I don't see a lot of extra tax dollars being burned on schools here in Texas. Hiring qualified teachers is a bitch down here, since the payscale is so low, compared to the work required.
      • by ahfoo ( 223186 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:06AM (#6715902) Journal
        it's not in the classrooms. That's the tricky part. You don't see the waste that goes on in public school districts because it's off limits even for the teachers. You walk into the classroom and you see this pathetic scene and you think, god these people need money bad. And they do, but that doesn't mean there isn't extravagant waste. It's just that you're not permitted to see it.
        The waste is at the district level, not the classrooms. And the worst offenders are usually the district network admins why are owned by MS at the vast majority of American K-12 schools.
        In large part, this district level administrative waste is the major motive for the charter school initiative.
        It's all rather insidious though because if you ask for more information, you won't get anywhere for so-called security reasons. That's security like as in job security. Call it the corporate/educational complex if you will.
        • by zangdesign ( 462534 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @03:38PM (#6718406) Journal
          I just talked to a teacher last night - they run MS windows for the school district. Guess how many people they have to administer about 3,000 computers?

          One.

          Now, tell me they're wasting money on IT staff. MS works for them because it's easily explainable to teaching staff, who wind up handling the actual hands on (for obvious reasons). While Linux might be a better solution from a technology standpoint, the training and setup (in labor) costs would be exhorbitant, and way beyond the capabilities of one person to make it secure and idiot (student & teacher) proof.

          Plus, where's the software? Wine? Does it support every feature of each installed package? The administration is going to want to know that they can get the full potential value (not the real, actual value) of their software. Will Wine run everything that's available for the PC? If not, what's the replacement package on Linux?

          These are questions that aren't being answered very well by the Open Source community, because (opinion coming) they don't care! They're so focused on technology for it's own sake or on beating down Microsoft, they're overlooking that it's not realistic to just up and replace things without some sort of infrastructure to support it.

    • by Malcontent ( 40834 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:29AM (#6715704)
      Or better yet why not see if standardising on all apple costs less. Apple might have a lower TCO.
    • I can tell you from first hand experience (withouth doing some research), that supporting multiple platforms in an arena (education) in which information technology is a high priority and the amount of workers/$ paid to workers is inversely proportional, that supporting multiple platforms on top of multiple hardware configurations really, really racks up the man hours thus driving up the cost.
    • real reason (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SHEENmaster ( 581283 ) <travis&utk,edu> on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:35AM (#6715730) Homepage Journal
      The techs at most public schools are dumbasses. It's sad but true. (I apologize if you are a tech at a school that doesn't follow this trend. Keep up the good work.)

      My entire school's network accesses the web over one of two T1 lines. Rather than a load-balancing Linux server, they have two 80486 systems with 32mb apiece running illegally purchased copies of NT4, with only service pack 2.

      The school's techs worked for 3 damn weeks trying to get an iMac G4 on the school network. Every printer in the school is shared, while none of them have passwords. Every teacher's computer is shared, while none of them have passwords. Hell, the records server's Administrator password is the initials of the school!

      In the middle of a budget crisis(we'll go broke Oct 1), the school bought 40+ Athlon computers.

      Macs are going out of schools. It's not because OS X is any harder to use (perfect blend of idiot friendliness and power), but rather because idiot-proofing is now being winshit compatible.

      Apple computers will always be used in video editing classes, and PCs have wormed their way into the rest of the school years ago. Apple lost the battle during System 7, it's time to move on and accept that the world at large can't be steered by a better product. If they focus on the informed consumers and professionals, they'll survive and flourish.
      • Hell, the records server's Administrator password is the initials of the school!

        What school is this?

        *concocts a plan to get failing students to help fund a G5 tower purchase*

      • Any Mac under 2 years old with 256MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS X. And any native G3 or G4 with a CD-ROM and 192MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS 9. (And I'm talking Virtual PC 6, of course - latest and greatest.)

        That means the schools can have their "single platform" in terms of hardware support -- yet also have diversity. OS X? Check -- and of course, you can run Office:X on it, if you want your students to learn to be mice, er, MOUSes. OS 9? Just start Classic. DOS? It's in

    • by Artana Niveus Corvum ( 460604 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:52AM (#6715765) Homepage Journal
      I think it goes further than that. Many schools I've either gone to or visited for one reason or another DO have a single platform. Apple.
      More than that, by far the most virii and worms are "available for" (pardon that) the Microsoft platform. I know there are bgillions of Linux zealots that are gonna say "but even fewer are for Linux than are for Apple." This is true. However, as much as I use (and enjoy using) Linux on both my desktops and my servers, there are some very real benefits to using the Apple platform. The obvious (and possibly hotly debated) one is ease-of-use. In the school of interface design and usability, Mac wins. They've pretty much always won. If you take a person who has never used a computer before and sit them in front of Gnome, KDE, or Microsoft's latest offering, they're going to choke. (I know it has been pounded into the ground, but who would honestly think "I should click 'start' in order to shut down my computer"?) I've seen it. Take that same person and stick them in front of a Mac, they'll be intimidated for a few moments perhaps, but when things act as they expect them to act, they'll be relieved and comforted. No right clicks, no middle clicks... (yes I know MacOS supports these functions, but it doesn't need them, especially for what a brand new user wants). Simple baby steps.
      Yes, I know there have been "studies" done comparing these interfaces. Unfortunately none of these that I have seen has been done by a person who has never used a computer before. I'd be interested to see one, but I imagine I know what the result would be.
      Another thing to think about when comparing OSX to XFree86: uniformity. I know that you like to customize your widgets and this and that so that they're just the way you want them under whatever your window manager of choice is. I know this because it's something that I often want too. It's just not so for Joe Blow-I've-never-used-a-computer-before or his cousin Jane Doe-I've-used-a-computer-twice-in-my-life. They generally just want one thing as far as interface design goes: Everything to look the same. Uniformity. They don't want to mess with the differences between things that use gtk or qt or any number of other similar things. They want it to look the same in their word processor as it does in their web browser as it does in their instant messaging client, etc.
      Another thing about MacOS: it tends to scale with the user. If the user's skill level advances over time, MacOS (X especially) tends to grow a bit with the user. They discover what it is that that "shell thingy" that their geek friends talk about can do, for example. The dos promptish thing under Windows XP just can't compare. Linux has a great many things under the hood for the curious user, but the competence level to just get your work done is a great deal higher than either of the other OSes mentioned. Yes, I know you can make X act almost however you want but the key here is that most people don't want to know how to do this because they don't care, they just want it to work
      Anyway, I hope I've made some sort of point anyway. Believe what you will. Hurray for {insert OS of your choice here}.
    • by kramer2718 ( 598033 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @03:06AM (#6715800) Homepage
      I agree that Diversity in platforms at schools is important, but not for the reasons of stability and security.

      Rather, I think it's extremely important that students have the opportunity to use more than one platform. It gives them the idea that the is something beyand Windows. It also makes them much more adaptable to different environments and thus makes them more marketable and trainable.

      I was an adjunct faculty member at a very small University. One of the classes that I taught was How to Use MS Excel (that wasn't the actual title, but that's what the material consisted of). Anyway, I thought it was a crying shame that that was all the computer training most of them would get in their college careers, so I took some liberties (various internet based projects). There was an extra day, so I thought that I would teach them to log in to a Unix server through telnet. They were clueless. They tried to follow what I said, but they had no concept of figuring things out on their own.

      If there had been Macs (with OSX) in their high schools, most would probably have been more confident using a shell and in general not so stuck in a Windows frame of mind. If anything, I think high schools should use more Macs. Now that they are BSD based, they are more compatible with real OSs while at the same time being fairly easy for a novice.

      I know, I know it's hard to have much of an IT budget as a public school, and that's sad. Schools should certainly get more money. It will certainly help the future of the US more than lining oil barons' pockets or dropping bombs on brown people.
      • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:28AM (#6715946)
        They tried to follow what I said, but they had no concept of figuring things out on their own.

        (This is slightly off-topic, but I just want to get this off my chest)

        I don't know about you but I am a lecturer at university level (I'm posting AC because some of my students might recognize me) and for the last five years I've observed a gradual decline in the motivation and, in particular,

        They come to the class and sit there like empty receptacles I am supposed to fill in with information that'll be on the exam. If I digress and try to tell them something extra-curricular (like showing photos from my latest trip to the ALS [lbl.gov]) they'll scream bloody murder (or first they'll ask if this will be on the exam and if it's not they'll scream bloody murder).

        You try to ask them questions and you get blank looks. Some students look at each other as if they're confused by the prospect that they'd actually participate in the class. Some people who I know know the answer won't say anything and keep staring at their open book as if there's something particularly interesting in there.

        And don't get me wrong. They are not fundamentally stupid people beneath the surface. They just don't know how to use their head until someone tells them how. Some of them actually do know how, but the reason why they are so passive remained unanswered for a long time.

        Then, last week, I was visiting my brother who's married with children when her 10-year old niece came to me and asked if "uncle could help with my math homework". The homework was typical 3rd grade mathetmatics and it was apparent that while my niece was mathematically talented, the problem was actually quite hard to solve using the methods they had been taught so far. I skimmed a few pages forwards and lo-and-behold, there was the method I would have used. I showed it to her and said something along the line "You can always go ahead and look for help in the later parts of the book - you're so good with math that you can learn these things by yourself".

        She took the book, smiled shyly but looked a bit worried. Then she said something that still makes my blood boil: "But my teacher says that we are not supposed to learn anything by ourselves because we might learn wrong things".

        I mean what the hell?! Since when did thinking for yourself and being interested in the subject become "a bad thing"? Learning wrong things?!

        I know this is just one case and it's impossible to draw any conclusions based this, but I have a suspicion that something is horribly wrong in the school these days. Could it be that this "do what I say and God help you if you try to learn things on your own!" attitude is prevalent and actually making people into these passive vessels that expect teachers just to pour information into them.

        Anyone else experienced anything similar?

        Oh, and with my bros permission I called that teacher about the matter and told her in no uncertain terms that if I ever hear that my niece has been discouraged by teachers from thinking and learning, I'll call PTA and the local newspaper and I'll sue the school too.

        • by Pharmboy ( 216950 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @06:52AM (#6716200) Journal
          She took the book, smiled shyly but looked a bit worried. Then she said something that still makes my blood boil: "But my teacher says that we are not supposed to learn anything by ourselves because we might learn wrong things".

          If you think the kids are stupid enough, you will only allow them to learn what is on the standardized tests that the TEACHERS are graded on.

          My wife and I talk about this all the time, one reason we DONT have children. The schools simply are too focused on outcome based education: every child must be equally smart (or dumb) and must learn the same way. It requires effort to help on an individual basis, and the teachers themselves are strongly discouraged from using their own judgement. It's not just their fault, its a problem with the entire system, top to bottom.

          Part of the problem IS federal money. There should be none, since it is only given in return for schools having programs or acting in ways that may not be the best for THOSE students. The more removed an agency is, the less it knows what is best for your children. The schools must be 100% answerable to the local population, and 0% to the feds. There is a reason there is NO mention of public schools in the constitution, it should be a local matter, where you can hold them accountable, and choke the living shit out someone when necessary, such as your well stated comment implies you verbally did.
        • by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @08:38AM (#6716449)
          Anyone else experienced anything similar?

          Yeah, I did, when I was in 3rd grade, forty-odd years ago. I'm not surprised to see that nothing has changed. Teaching children is a low-paying occupation, and you get two kinds of people:

          1) Those who aren't competent to do anything else ("those who can, do...")

          2) Those who have a calling to teach and are willing to accept substandard pay to do it.

          Teachers in category one mainly teach by rote, following a rigid lesson plan, so a bright student who thinks and reads ahead is a problem. Of course, teachers in category 2 are delighted by this kind of challenge.

          School administrators, of course, tend to be mostly in category one, since they don't actually teach. And they tend to favor teachers in category one, because they don't make waves. Basically the same mentality that leads them to favor a single computing platform...

          • by zazas_mmmm ( 585262 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @11:43AM (#6717217)
            I don't think the original post in this thread is off-topic at all. Here's why:

            teachers in category 2 are delighted by this kind of challenge.

            I'm afraid the current push for standardized testing and the over-administration of teachers is quickly clearing our schools of this kind of teacher.

            My mom has just retired early (59) out of frustration because she can no longer teach in a way that's meaningful. She taught for 35 years as a public kindergarten teacher. She worked at school from 8 am until 5 pm, at-home lesson planning at least an hour and a half every night, and at least 3 or 4 hours every Sunday (my entire childhood). She had her kids doing creative mathematics and writing their own (albeit short) stories and illustrating their books by the end of the year.

            Then the mandatory standardized testing started a few years back and the district locked down all of the ways she can teach. She has to teach only from textbooks and workbooks and give these five year olds frequent standardized tests. The kids must earn a letter grade at the end of the year. There are classroom observers that come in frequently that will downgrade the school if she isn't teaching according to this new curriculum. No more story reading. No more creative mathematics and learning about patterns with unifix cubes. No more buddy projects with the 4th graders who would come in for additional creative learning time. It's all gone. My mom's students always loved school at the end of the year and couldn't wait for first grade. Now they all hate school and much of my mom's job is keeping them on task when they're bored out of their skulls.

            My mom was the most dedicated teacher I have ever known. She easily worked 55 hours a week for the duration of her career and has a masters in early childhood education and a certificate in bilingual education. Teachers like my mom are no longer welcome in the public school classrooms of America.

            It's pretty clear that we're in the midst of the corporatization of our public school systems [ascd.org]. Textbook conglomerates like Houton Mifflin [sacbee.com] and McGraw-Hill are making an absolute fortune off of the recent changes. Not surprisingly, they were also the companies who sponsored the educational studies that were used by legislators to push for these changes. Is it any wonder that a company like Apple would get pushed out of such an environment?
    • Apple as the sole platform in a school will require a superintendent who uses a carrot or stick or both to push Apple there. I know at our college there were too many who were used to their Outlook and MS Office and the general GUI too much to accept learning a new platform. Many software that were bought.. accounting, payroll etc all ran on win32 only.

      Switching to entirely an Apple solution quickly would be too expensive. That would mean liquidating a great number of new x86 hardware and software. To be e
  • The Mac advantage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ickoonite ( 639305 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:25AM (#6715682) Homepage
    Much is made of the Mac's durability, reliability, low TCO (when everything is factored in). Doesn't this have any appeal any more in education?

    Quoth the article:
    It all comes back to what I call the lemming effect -- the willingness of people to follow blindly along, never questioning as they march in step with everyone else.

    Ah, the age old problem. One might say Mac zealots are a similar breed, but I'd have thought that for education, a computer as damn simple as a Mac would be an enormous boon, especially when you think of the savings on support.

    And they're so purdy... :P Of course, IT managers don't care about purdy, and I do feel inclined to, once again, make a comment about IT managers recommending what they know and what will keep them in a job...

    Oh well, guess it's all downhill hereon. Still, he shoulda called Apple beleaguered... :P

    iqu :s
    • I started at Drexel when they were and All-mac school. 1994, the Power Mac just came out, I had one of the first models. 2 years later Drexel suddenly announced that we were all going PC. Of course all of the courseware on campus was Macintosh. All of the network infrastructure was Macintosh. All of the students were still paying the credit card bills from the purchase of their machintosh.

      They ditched their working mainframe software that handled billing and scheduling for an NT based system. I'll be kind


  • I've worked in an educational setting this whole summer and I can vouch for the administrators' (both educational and technical) point of view. Now throw in another point briefly mentioned in the article:

    Gee, a $100-$150 (at most) educational discount on a $1700 IMac (~$1600 total) or a $500 Dell?

    Granted, that's not entirely comparing apples to apples (pun intended purely as an afterthought), but that's how most educators, teachers, and students will see it. What would you want to work on or buy if you were a cash strapped student?
    • by Malcontent ( 40834 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:33AM (#6715720)
      As Microsoft is so fond of saying. There is more to TCO then the initial purchase price. Microsoft insists that windows has a lower TCO despite the fact that Linux is free. It seems to me apple would save enough on admin costs alone to make up the difference.

      Of course there is also the fact that you are educating the kids to learn a unix operating system. As Microsoft is so fond of pointing out Unix sysadmins get paid more then Windows sysadmins. Why educate your kids to get lower paid positions?
      • Sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of the Microsoft bed today. I don't care what kids get educated on, as long as they are learning.

        What I was trying to portray in my post is that 99.97% of the educators out there would get a glazed over look when it comes to Linux, Unix, etc. I'm sad to say that all they want is that "cool, black Dell" and to be sent packing so that they can surf the web and check their email.

        Besides, the whole idea of TCO in the world of information technology would baffle administrators who also want that "cool, black Dell" and to be sent packing so that they can surf the web and check their email. As long as it's initial purchase price is CHEAPER than everything else.

        Sad to say, but true.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Gee, a $100-$150 (at most) educational discount on a $1700 IMac (~$1600 total) or a $500 Dell?

      Hm, I'll take the $799 (oops, make that $699 educational institution price) eMac.

      e for Education, see.

      You're probably exaggerating the Dell price too, but I can't bear the thought of going to their site to check.

    • Oh, come on! A $1700 iMac? Why coulnd't you bother to check the prices first? Apple Store sells iMacs starting at $1299 and eMacs starting at $799. For schools, that would be $1199 and $699 respectively, possibly less with a volume discount. And maybe not buying direct from Apple will lower the price further. And this includes a monitor, does the $500 Dell include this?

      Btw, the cheapest Dell (with a monitor) I managed to find for a K12 institution in PA was $666. This model didn't have a modem (wich probably doesn't matter, though) or FireWire (probably more interesting).
    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 17, 2003 @08:16AM (#6716361)
      I am posting this as Anonymous Coward because I work for a public higher education institution, and I have a budget that I manage.

      I recently needed a couple of workstations for my office area. I went to the network administrator to ask for price quotes. He of course pulls quotes from a PC manufacturer. He only buys one brand of PCs for desktops, another brand of PCs for laptops for the school.

      Here's what he quoted me:
      2.4 GHz P4
      512MB RAM
      40GB HD
      CD-ROM
      17" Standard CRT Monitor
      Price (with loyal customer discount because our institution buys so many machines from them): $1050

      Now, I decided to do a price comparison on a similar equipped Mac. Here's what I was quoted from Apple:

      emac, 800Mhz G4
      512MB RAM (remember the prices of RAM from Apple?)
      40GB HD
      CD-ROM
      17" Flat CRT Monitor
      3-year AppleCare warranty
      Price: $953.00

      Despite the inflated prices Apple charges for RAM upgrades, a comparably equipped Mac was about $100 less than the PC. When you start looking at PCs with CD or DVD burners and flat-panel displays, the iMacs in comparison are an even better value at the education pricing. The 800Mhz processor? These systems would be primarily used for wordprocessing and spreadsheets, so I would think the 800Mhz processor would be adequate. Our desks are small, so the eMac's space saving design would work well in our environment. Our campus has the sitewide Microsoft licensing that INCLUDES Office for Mac OS X, so no additional charges for that. Not to mention that with the Mac I would have had the capability of creating PDF files built-in without having to go out and purchase additional software or worry with licensing issues with some of the freeware/shareware equivilants on the PC side.

      To make a long story short, I COULD have got the Macs and saved the state some money and still had very capable machines for the job I was doing for years to come. But I had no choice but to go with the PCs because I WASN'T GIVEN A CHOICE. The network administrator has final say on all computer purchases. Be damned about the needs of the folks who need to do the work or the students. Need to create PDF files? "Well, we can purchase a license of Acrobat..." More of the state's money being spent that wasn't necessary. The money could have been spent on something else that was needed but will have to be put off.

      Oh, and one more thing. You've gotta watch the educational price quotes from the PC manufacturers. I see their education material all the time, and you can find out some of it on their websites. They inflate the retail value of the equipment so they can say the education price is $500 lower. And despite their "lower education price", often times what they offer is last year's technology at prices that's higher that what you can purchase today's technology through the standard consumer channels. Apple's education discounts may not look great, but their pricing scheme for education is straightforward with no smoke and mirrors.

      Mod this down if you want, but if you don't believe it, go do a little research and find out.

      End of rant.
  • by Eudial ( 590661 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:26AM (#6715685)
    http://w1.901.telia.com/~u90121759/ahem.JPG [telia.com]

    Look cloesely at the "sponsorship announcement" next to the article.
  • Redundant Troll? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:27AM (#6715691)
    haven't we been doing the "Apple is dying" thing since the days before /.? Before teh Intarweb even? :oP
  • by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:27AM (#6715696) Homepage Journal
    So, the deal is that the school IT folks have been sold down the river on the concept that a single platform will save them money. Furthermore, they have been sold on the concept that Windows will save them money.

    The reality is quite different. For example, a good friend of mine's wife is a grade school teacher. Their school last year had a bunch of LCIII's and IIsi's that they wanted to replace with new Macs. The district IT said no, and they would be replaced with Wintel based machines. So, not only did the Macs work with only a single teacher administering them for over ten years on his own time, they now have a staff of four administering the Wintel machines, their costs have gone up 600% for administration alone and the district tells them the machines will be replaced in four years.

    I ask you. How has this scenario saved the district, the school or the taxpayer any money? Administration costs have skyrocketed and the computers will have to be replaced more often. Rather as Cringley and others have stated, it sounds like a consipiracy to maintain IT jobs and expand their budget.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      this is not a logical argument. you are comparing the cost of administrating a bunch of lcIIIs to the cost of administrating a bunch of new machines. you can not surf the internet with lcIIIs, much less do video editing. you should be comparing the cost of emacs vs. pcs, and i think that windows would prove to be cheaper in this case (atleast in the initial purchase, administration might be a bit more expensive).
  • by GreatDrok ( 684119 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:30AM (#6715708) Journal
    As an employer I looked for people who had a range of experience. These people would be able to cope when changes and challenges presented themselves. I remember even twenty years back putting someone one a computer to do some work and they said that they had only be taught how to use another software package and they were completely stumped by what I was asking them to do.

    The same is true today. People trained to use MS Office and Windows are frequently hopeless when put in front of another OS. Someone who has learned how to use computers rather than a particular OS and package are much more flexible and know how to read a manual. They will be more productive in the long run than these MS trained drones.

    For this reason I would encourage schools to look for less uniformity not more. Mac, UNIX, Linux, Windows, Be, even VMS, it's all good and the diversity helps stem the tide of malware. Whatever happened to the network being the computer? The client shouldn't matter, mix 'em up and we'll have more rounded students entering the workforce.
  • by evn ( 686927 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:33AM (#6715721)
    Most students could easily complete everything up to a highschool level education using any computing platform: Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Windows is self-perpetuating: we teach Windows because it's popular, it's popular because it's what people know. It's a shame it's gotten to this state of affairs. Even if a single platform is more cost effective to maintain than a mixed environment moving to Linux or BSD on the existing x86 hardware in a school would be cheaper than sticking with Windows licensing for Windows, Office, NT Server and on the next hardware upgrade cycle moving to Macintosh systems (if that's deamed to be the best move) or upgrading the x86 systems already there. I think a two major reasons for the standardization on Windows has to do with the administrators trying to secure their employment (weekly patches = overtime) and the fear of maintaining something they aren't familar with.
  • by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:34AM (#6715724) Homepage
    Haddad writes about Macs in K-12 education, but he seems to be a little too anxious to make his point.

    Haddad said: "Hear what Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison (Wis) school district, told the local Capital Times. He conceded that Macs outperform PCs, but he didn't care. "We want a single platform," he said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it."

    Not quite. Here's what the Capital Times printed:

    Superintendent Art Rainwater acknowledged that in some cases, Macintosh computers outperform their competitors.

    Slight difference there?

    Haddad continued his imaginitive use of quotes further on: "Drama teacher Rebecca Jallings at Madison West High School, for one, is fighting Rainwater's effort to strip her classroom of Macs. She told the Capital Times that she finds them the best machines by far for editing video, an important tool in her acting class."

    Jallings may have told the Capital Times that, but it never published it, at least in the version that appears on the Capital Times web archives. [madison.com]

    As an aside, Jallings records the students on video and then puts it on the Mac. The Capital Times [madison.com] reports "Rebecca Jallings, a theater teacher at Madison West High School, shoots video of her students as they learn to act. If they're "doing that swaying thing again" during their monologue, she said, she rolls the footage on her Macintosh computer and can prove it to the student immediately."

    Quite how that's superior to using a video camera alone is beyond me.
    • by randyest ( 589159 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:49AM (#6715758) Homepage
      Anxious is a polite way to put it. He's not only vociferously wrong, his zealotry is annoying.

      Why haven't steep price cuts stemmed Apple's market fall?

      Because they didn't happen, at least not compared to wintel boxes. Proof [slashdot.org].

      It all comes back to what I call the lemming effect -- the willingness of people to follow blindly along, never questioning as they march in step with everyone else.


      Riight. You don't like it, so everyone doing it is a lemming. If everyone we buying macs on the other hand, they would definitely not be lemmings.

      Don't get me wrong: Conformity isn't all bad, especially when it comes to computers. A decade ago, most workplaces were a mess of different models, few of which could work together, let alone speak to one another.


      Huh? Usually, when you use the construct "few could A, let alone B", B is harder than A. In this case, A = work together (doesn't that imply "speaking" to one another?), B = speak to one another. I don't get it. This reversal of sense is disturbing.

      The whole article is disturbing, in fact, and I'm sorry I read it.
  • by Adair ( 629401 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:34AM (#6715726)
    "Why should my child work on a Mac in class when most people use PCs at home and in the office?"

    To show them that there are other options besides Windows. What kids really learn on computers at school is how to use applications more than the OS itself... word processors, spreadshee software, video editing... all these things translate fairly easily between OSes. At least having kids "grow up" and learn on a Mac shows them that there are other choices out there for Operating Systems once they leave the nest. The fact that OSX is now BSD-based makes me all the more in favor of it... might get a few more kids interested in *nix/open-source development. If only the decision-makers had a broader vision of the future the say they're trying to make the best of.
    • OS Change (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Llywelyn ( 531070 )
      The refutation I've also heard to this is along a slightly different line, but equally valid: XP is nothing like Windows 95 is nothing like Windows 3.1. OS X is nothing like OS 9, which is fundamentally different than OS 7.

      That's been in the last 10 years. A kid is trained on Windows XP in high school (or even grade school or middle school!) and the operating system is going to be fundamentally different--even if they are still using "Windows" or "MacOS"--by the time they are out of college.
  • by Pingsmoth ( 249222 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:35AM (#6715728) Homepage
    I believe the New York Times had a piece on this last spring also. At any rate, it's too bad that Apple is slowly losing this battle too. I believe that they have had the suprerior product for years, but when only a fraction of homes have Macs, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the students to have to learn to use a Mac at school.

    Case in point: I go to the University of Nebraska. They used to have Macs all over the school, but now they are all but phased out by PCs. Despite the fact that many of my classmates still have problems with papers getting lost of their floppies (floppies!) and have their computers "break down" on them, they continue to use PCs at home and at school. Just last Thursday I was at a workshop where we were all given iBooks to access a web page. The setup could not have been simpler, for the dock contained exactly three items: the finder, the applications folder, and the trash. And yet people still couldn't figure it out. Their home PCs were familiar and therefore simpler to use. And from their perspective, why should they have to use a computer at school that does not take their floppy disks and is different from their home PCs.

    From an administrative standpoint, it is a lot cheaper (in the short run) to get a truckload of Dells for $400. They will break more often, they will be attacked by more worms, and they will continue to reinforce the age-old reliance on floppy disks, but the up-front cost is half that of an eMac, so it's a better solution.

    I wish Apple still controlled the education market, and to a large degree, they still do. Schools keep their computers for years, but the new generation of educational PCs won't be stamped with my much-beloved Apple logo. For now Apple is still riding out their honeymoon with schools, but shortsighted thinking and short-term economics may make that a thing of the past.
  • The problem... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by incom ( 570967 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:35AM (#6715731)
    Schools can only afford low end tech salaries, and thus they mostly get one of the flood of ignorant MSCE sheep. And it doen't take much experience to realize how fanatical they are about Microsoft.
  • Not a problem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by veg_all ( 22581 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:41AM (#6715743)
    When I went to high school, we used TRS-80's [kjsl.com]. At home, I used an Apple II [apple2history.org] In college, the net was VAX [hp.com]. Later, I used the product of a company that will go unnamed and unlinked. Recently (and for the past half-decade) I used linux because what I learned was the idea, not the platform. Don't underestimate the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young humans. They are amazing creatures.
  • by WegianWarrior ( 649800 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:43AM (#6715744) Journal

    ...at least not when you consider what ought to be the primary focus of any schoolsystem: to give the children knowledge and prepare them for a life in the real world. A school is not a place you keep your kids until they are old enought to move out, it's supposed to be a place your kids are prepared to become a contributing member of society.

    One may or may not like it, but for most kinds of work out there, the Wintel-platform is what it is all about. Working with office-apps? Chances are that you're not using a Mac. Accessing a database? I'll guess ten to one that the clientend is a windowsapp.

    As long as the subject matter isn't one where the Mac dominate in the real world, schools shouldn't "miseducate" (sorry, I couldn't think of a word that fitted better) the pupils by using machines from Apple - weither or not they are better / cheaper to maintain / has more fancy colours than a wintel machine. If they do, they are not doing our children any favours.

    Towards the end of school, say the last couple of years before people graduate, I think it would be wise to have a "general OS" class, teaching the pupils the basic of not just the wintel or the MacOS, but also divers flavours of Linux, BDS, Contiki and whatnot. Show the pupils that there are many more operatingsystems out there, each with a distinct set of pros and cons, and make them make up their own mind what they will use at home; because when they start working they will have to use whatever the company has decided on.

    PS: the line 'Here and there you'll still find an original Mac -- not to mention a few Apple IIs -- hard at work in classrooms' isn't really saying anything about the longvity of the mac - but it does say a whole lot about the lack of proper funding of the schools.

    • by pHDNgell ( 410691 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @03:23AM (#6715831)
      This argument is sad. I've got a kid in 3rd grade and a kid in Kindergarten. That pretty much gives me a minimum of about 10 years before they're likely to be using computers in the work place.

      You'd have to be completely ignorant of any history of computers to assume that the computers these kids will be using in ten years will be anything like the computers they're using today.

      If you want to teach the kids spreadsheets, any random spreadsheet will be fine. There's nothing particularly special about MS' spreadsheet that any school kid should care about. If they have to learn how to use a different app when they get out in the world, who cares? If they learned anything during school, the new app shouldn't be a challenge.

      There's certainly no advantage to teaching kids how to use Microsoft products as if K-12 is some kind of vocational school. Give them squeak. Give them Linux. Give them whatever tool happens to help them learn whatever you're trying to teach them. Just don't hold ``computer'' classes where you teach them today's popular business programs and hope nothing changes in the industry in the next ten or twenty years.
      • Indeed! I can't believe reasonably intelligent people can still possibly believe this myth. Even a minute of thought will reveal that fallacy of "teach kids Windows because that's what's in the workforce".

        As stated by the parent poster, they can't possibly expect applications and OS's to be the same 10 years down the road. (well, maybe if MS gets its way and gets a 100% monopoly, they will. . .)

        As an example, when I was in high school, they taught keyboarding on WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS because that was

  • by cleverhandle ( 698917 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @02:55AM (#6715771)
    I teach in one of the largest public school districts in the states, and in my experience this article is both irrelevant and incorrect.

    First off, as others have pointed out, the price difference is far from inconsequential. Even under a Preferred Purchasing agreement for Wintel that, IMO, is a slimy ripoff, we would still pay $200+ more for a low end Mac.

    Second, Macs are used in precisely the places the article points out as strengths - video editing and multimedia. While my district in general and my school in particular are pretty crude technologically, we do have two small labs of Macs for Graphic Design and Publishing courses.

    As for losing other opportunities in the building, Apple's got no one to blame for themselves. As behind as I think we are, we've still got attendance and other functions running on an NT domain. Why? Not because we're close-minded and bought-out (well, maybe we are, but not in this context). But because Apple all but abandoned the educational market years ago. We had the NT domain long before we moved critical functions to it. If Apple had halfway reasonable pricing and a larger educational program four years ago, running those functions on NT might not have been as simple a choice. The argument that "we've got to teach MS because that's what's out there" is powerful, though not as much so as some Slashdotters may suspect. But combine that with a preexisting NT network assembled during years of Apple's educational neglect, and it makes buying Macs for the classroom foolish.
  • by Dr. Bent ( 533421 ) <ben.int@com> on Sunday August 17, 2003 @03:00AM (#6715787) Homepage
    The entire concept of running any decent-sized orginization on a single platform is crazy. Commercial vendors will always want to lock you into their platform. But heed these words well:

    Salesmen have to sell whatever they're given.

    Most companies will simply shoehorn all thier products into whatever market they can get thier hands on, just so they can compete. But any engineer worth his salt knows that things work best when you use the right tool for the right job.

    The real issue here is that people are lazy. So when someone comes along with a song and dance about how all thier support problems are going to be solved by the One True Platform, they swallow the bullshit. Lazy IT people never follow up to figure out if that's actually true. And even if they do, and lazy managers ignore the IT people to make it look like they're 'managing' something by pretending to save money.
  • there's more to it (Score:5, Informative)

    by b17bmbr ( 608864 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @03:13AM (#6715811)
    i am a school teacher. my district is probably like many. our IT staff are morons. we don't/can't pay industry standards, so we get the bottom. plus, the jobs are secure, so we can't get rid of idiots. anyways...

    a little story. a year or so back, district tech at my school brags about coming back from some microsoft conference, (mind you we are a novell network) and he's got freebies galore. XP pro ( no reg key copies), VS.NET, 2K server, office XP (no reg key), and other crap. thrown out like halloween candy. you think they're gonna cut off their source.

    another story. 3-4 years ago, we were finishing the wiring at my school. so, the district tech head is there, yada yada. so i ask her about the servers, since we didn't even have a local file server for our one lab, (and I had lots of student work get lost), and she says the district goal is to consolidate on get this, "fewer, more powerful, servers". this at the time that when the industry was moving the opposite direction. and then she retires, and we're half way there, and there is just too much momentum to change. so we go ahead, and have a crappy, unscalable network, and we have win98 clients rather than 2k, because of a multitude of piss poor decisions, we have no money to spend on memory upgrades.

    these people have the ears of the PHB's. and let's face it, if it needs 20 admins where another solution would need 10, and their input makes the call, what do you think they're gonna choose.

    for those of you who don't quite understand school spending/funding, let me explain. every year, principals have an end of year "wish list", if there is money left over. why? if they don't spend it, they get less next year. so, saving money is specifically NOT DESIRED. in fact, deficits are preferred. don't ever expect linux to make it in this environment. i could go on. get the ear of your school boards. or vote their asses out.
  • by Sigh Phi ( 324315 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @03:29AM (#6715841)

    I remember my high school computer teacher in 1991 telling us that we needed to learn DOS and Wordperfect 5.1 because "that's what they use in industry." He always said "industry" as if it was this mythical, magical place, the one place where people paid for computer skills, the monolithic arbiter of everything good and meaningless.

    Of course, I used a Mac. And his explanations about our need for DOS seemed strange. We used WordPerfect in computer class, and I wrote my English, Biology, and History papers at home in MacWrite and PageMaker. I learned how to program a simple ASCII charting program in GW-BASIC at school, then went home and wrote a grade record tracking program in HyperCard.

    I was, of course, told that my efforts were wasted, because "industry" didn't use Macs. That turned out to be mostly true. But it seemed awfully strange, a year later, taking the second "advanced" computer course to be using Windows, the "future" of the industry and finding myself completely bored to tears. I wrote a simple word processor in C in my spare time from samples in a Mac programming book. The geeks in my school never learned from Windows. They used Macs or they used DOS, and most everybody respected the motive, if not the platform. I learned more from the Mac geeks, though. They just seemed to have more fun, without having to rely on "games."

    When the SoftArc FirstClass bulletin board/email system was really hitting its stride in 1993, I proposed to the school principal and the head of the computer program the idea of creating a school-wide bulletin board hooked up to OneNet and then, eventually, the Internet. I demoed it on my Mac IIsi. All they could see was the Mac. "They don't use Macs in industry," the computer teacher said. "PCs don't do graphics like that," the principal said. It was all very disappointing. I was trying to point out the possibilities of interaction. All they saw was something that they couldn't do (they could, but they just didn't know) with their Intel-Microsoft computers. I learned that day that it didn't take a lot of imagination to be a teacher or an administrator, and that's why I sift dumpsters for food and clothing now, rather than teach.

  • by panurge ( 573432 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:14AM (#6715920)
    But I think it bears repetition. This is a de facto monopoly based, not on open standards, but on one manufacturer's products. The education system is being sold to a high bidder, and on a false premise (i.e that the job of schools is to teach children how to use a product, not teach them how to learn and to apply knowledge.)

    Imagine if every driving school in the US was to use nothing but Ford. Or every geometry class required kids to buy one particular make of compass, ruler and protractor. Or if every school was required to use exactly the same model and make of chair and table from one manufacturer only, even though independent studies had shown that these chairs and tables had a shorter life span and needed more frequent repairs than the alternatives. There might be problems.

    The logical thing, as with other public procurement, would be to have an agreed open standard for school procurement, and allow suppliers to tender freely to meet that requirement. School IT administrators would be trained on the administration and maintenance of the base standard, and any supplier proposing any proprietary modifications would have to declare them and explain the on-costs for support staff training and additional maintenance.

    The answer to the parents who complain that children are not being trained to use home PCs is, it is no more our job to teach kids how to use your PC than your dishwasher, your TV or your lawnmower.

    Of course it won't happen. But it is the genuinely free market approach (i.e the customer decides the rules and the market delivers). What we have at the moment is literally fascism, i.e. a society in which the State works with and favors particular sections of industry, and in which officials corruptly work in both fields despite the conflict of interest. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a free, democratic, idealistic 1940s US to ride to the rescue any more.

  • BusinessWeek might have a point regarding the declining presence of Macs in K-12 computer labs as school officials turn towards a "single platform" for educational computing.

    I work at the IT office [umbc.edu] of a state-run public university [umbc.edu] that focuses on research. UMBC's 24-hour student computer labs contain hundreds of terminals with a variety of hardware/OS configurations (PCs, Macs [ranging from G3/4s to eMacs] and a smattering of SGI Indigos/Indys dating back to the mid 90's, when the state budget allowed for such purchases).

    Gradually, our student terminals -- PCs and Mac -- are shifting towards a "common platform": Unix. Our Macs are being upgraded to OSX, and each PC (most are Dell Optiplex GX-110s, GX150s and newer 270s) can be booted into either Windows 2000 or a customized RedHat lab image.

  • Cost is a factor... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chicane-UK ( 455253 ) <chicane-uk@ntlwor l d . c om> on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:21AM (#6715930) Homepage
    As is always the case really.. I work for a college, and our ratio of macs to PC's is probably 1 mac for every 150 PeeCee's. And its a case of a viscious circle - no one on the tech team really knows much about them as the college hardly buys any of them... and the college doesn't really want to buy them as hardly anyone knows about how to support them on our team.

    Its frustrating for me as I always try and push alternatives - refurbed cheap (but still hugely powerful) SGI's for CAD work, Linux in many situations, etc - but its always the same old story. Some excuse to get out of it and buy Intel boxes.

    From a techie point of view it makes the job easier, but I enjoy getting little diversity in the job - it makes it more of a challenge, and it forces the people I work with to learn new things. Most of them find it amusing to chastise Linux even though it is the backbone of the network - the proxy everyone is routed through, the DHCP address provider, and the DNS servers for every machine.

    I think the most overriding factor is money.. MacOSX itself is cheap, and if you could buy it for x86 machines, i'd buy it myself in a second - but the Apple hardware just costs too much, when you consider we were able to get Dell workstations with P4 2.4GHz, 256MB DDR RAM, 15" TFT monitors, and about 30GB harddrives for around $800. Apple can compete by providing machines at that price I am sure, but as OSX really does need a bit more horsepower to get the best out of it, then you really need to spend more to beef it up. How do you justify that to your Wintel loving mansgers with tight purse-strings...?
  • by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:37AM (#6715960) Journal
    In the Computer Science department, we have a room full of Pentium III systems. Only half of them work. Actually, depending on the moon cycle, it can be less than half.

    In the Mathematics department, we have a room full of ugly-ass old iMacs. I've only seen 1 or, at absolute most, 2 machines in the room that were not functioning.

    The worst part is that the Pentium III systems are set up on a fancy little "imaging" system, where each boot restores a remotely hosted disk image for whatever OS you choose (Win2000, Win98, or an old Red Hat Linux). So we're not even talking OS problems here - every working machine gets a fresh one every boot. It's pure hardware failures in that room.

    The iMacs all run off persistant locally-installed copies of OS something (not OS X, and I'm not much of a pre-OS X Mac user, so I can't tell you if it's OS 8 or 9 or what). No fancy re-imaging on boot or anything. Just an OS that doesn't tend to break, on hardware that doesn't tend to break.

  • by pelorus ( 463100 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:39AM (#6715962)
    One of our local colleges had a vote among their students. They were faces with a switch to OSX on one hand or a switch to Windows. Both would require a lot of work and a lot of money but their Mac hardware could run OSX.

    The student body voted and came back with Windows.

    So, the Macs were carted out, sold off cheaply (Yes, I made out like a bandit) and new PCs were installed.

    Then the problems started.

    Y'see. When the Macs were there, they were pretty open. There aren't too many viruses available for the Mac and the students could while away their lunchtimes playing UT on the iMacs and no-one would care. There just wasn't much malware and what there was, wasn't unrecoverable. All of the Macs had FireWire and I know of half a dozen really good student films that came out of students with a cheap camcorder and a couple of hours on ANY of the Macs there.

    The students came in and eagerly logged into their new Windows PCs and then discovered that they weren't permitted to install software. Or change the system clock. Or the language of the system. So, now there's no UT or CounterStrike during lunch.

    The other problems were hardware related. 20% of their CDRW drives have already been replaced and they had to buy extra machines for swap-out when the PCs flatline during or just before a class. There's a separate "Video Suite" which has higher quality PCs but the students involved in the film-making claim that it takes too long to edit video on those machines. Instead they bought a low end iMac and do it at their digs. For general use the PCs are fine - to get rid of registry crud and keep them up to date with patches, they re-image them every month and put a fresh install out there.

    Maybe it's not a fair comparison and a lot of the blame lies with the sysadmins but at the same time, due to the amount of malware for Windows, they couldn't just leave the machines completely open.
  • 532 Nanometers. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:57AM (#6715987)
    The premise of the article is ridiculous. The entire premise of people needing to learn the programs the "industry" uses is ridiculous. If you work somewhere you have to learn the software your job requires, not infrequently do businesses use software you've never seen before working there.

    I had to go downtown to the Hall of Justice one afternoon to pick up some paperwork. Waiting for the clerk to find the file I needed I was looking around the office. On the clerks desk I noticed an X terminal. Some sort of database search program was open on the screen. When the clerk came back I asked her about it and she just knew the box was a "terminal" and it ran her database software. Way back when my city signed a contract with Sun for a bunch of mainframes so I'm betting the terminal was probably hooked up to a Sun mainframe.

    That clerk was using a Unix system and X11. It is entirely likely at home she had a PC with Windows running on it. She was a bit older than me so it is even more likely she had never seen a computer in school. She had never used a computer before and was using SunOS daily. Did she know anything about it? Judging from the way she looked at me when I questioned her she didn't seem to know much if anything about the terminal or the mainframe driving it. She was using the terminal because she was trained to click the right buttons on the database app and type the right things in the right spots. Anyone who isn't a complete moron could be taught the same thing.

    At a publisher I worked for the pre-press office consisted of about twenty eight Macs. They were all running a program specifically written to layout and work with advertisements. Being as the program has little use outside of pre-press departments dealing with advertisement composing even the most advanced users in the office did't have it at home. I'd be really suprised if any school had ever taught that application specifically.

    Several of the people in the office had PCs at homes. All of the advanced (well paid) artists had Macs at home with most of the software in the office - Photoshop, Illustrator, XPress. My friend had a PC at home with those apps on it. At work he used a G4 PowerMac. Some of the people there while very nice people were computer dummies. They were however still able to use a rather purpose specific graphic design application, a custom written database system, and a Wyse terminal in the corner for order processing.

    The idea that people can't figure out how to use a PC because they were taught on Macs in school is simply absurd. If you understand basic computing concepts like clicking bottons on a mouse and typing things on a keyboard you can be trained to use just about anything. Thinking you're somehow going to train third graders useful or even applicable computer skills is an obscenely myopic idea. It would be at least ten years before a third grader ever really needed to use a computer in a professional capacity.

    Ten years ago DOS was all the rage and networks were voodoo. Teaching a third grader how to do everything in DOS would not be much help to them in today's job market. The Excel XP tips, tricks, and shortcuts will be equally useless in another ten years. What is important is teaching people the concepts of using computers. With the knowlege of concepts anybody can pick up the specifics pretty quickly.

    The pre-press workers and clerk I mentioned had been trained to use systems they were entirely unfamiliar with. They understood enough however to know what a keyboard and mouse were for. They were able to grasp the concept that clicking on-screen widgets would cause the program to do things. People who could not so much shut down there computers without help were able to lay out very nice looking advertisements. It is a shame people want public schools to become vocational daycare for minors.
  • Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vexalith ( 684137 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @04:58AM (#6715991)
    I think we have this the wrong way round. Surely we should be teaching children how to use a computer and not how to use Microsoft Whatever (TM).

    It'll be great for them in 10 years when some other company or consortium is producing the dominant operating system and all those hours of IT classes will be for absolutely nothing.

    I don't know what they're teaching kids these days, but a word processor is a word processor and a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet no matter what it says on the box or what operating system it uses. Shouldn't they be teaching people to look beyond the Microsoft Excel toolbar and realise that when it boils down to it, practically all these programs do the same thing? Sure perhaps OpenOffice.org doesn't do pivot tables like Microsoft Excel does them. But I have yet to see a school that teaches kids how to do pivot tables.

    Teaching them exclusively on one platform leads to the possibility of giving them a false sense of intuitiveness. Just because a you can't find C:\ or the Start Menu doesn't mean a platform is harder to use - unfortunately this is what many people seem to believe these days.

    If taught right, you should be able to pick up the basics of pretty much any program or operating system in about an hour.
  • Virus-vulnerable monoculture network!". "It's really quite simple you see, there is no other way to guarantee that the virus of the week, coded by some filipino script kiddy, can shutdown every single computer on our network" says J.D. Umbass, superintendent of Jefferson County School System, Pennsylvania. "Besides, if kids every growing up having an alternative perspective on computer technology, they may accidentally understand it." "And it can't be overstated, just how much we save yearly, by being able to hire idiots that only know how to say 'Reboot the computer and see if that fixes your problem'", J.D. Umbass.

    "Most important to remember though, is that we don't really teach the children anything other than how to be the secretary or register monkeys of tomorrow, earning minimum wage, and never quite enough to own the likes of the beautiful machines in our computer lab. So what does it matter, if they only get to experience the most ill-designed OS ever concieved, that's what Microsoft is extorting every PC and POS manufacturer into using." said J.D. Umbass.
  • by rtphokie ( 518490 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @08:39AM (#6716452)
    ... they need some new books.

    It amazes me that educated people get all up in arms about the computers in their kids schools. These are tools people!

    Reliance on computers in the classroom is turning academic programs into vocational ones. Mac? Windows? Linux? Who cares! Teach kids concepts not tasks.

    Some kids are learning how to fix carburators over in auto shop (for those schools where these things still exist) while other kids are in physics class learning how the internal combustion engine works. The kids in auto shop can apply that knowledge, pretty much just to fixing carberators.

    Similarly if we teach kids to accomplish specific tasks on specific hardware on specific software, that's pretty much all they'll be able to do with it.

    I've worked with some people who received serveral Cisco certifications without ever having touched a simulator much less a router. They had a far better conceptual understanding of what was going on and learned new skills and tasks very quickly as a result.
  • by theolein ( 316044 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @08:44AM (#6716466) Journal
    One thing I have noticed over the past number of years in forums and in chats is that very many (by no means all, but very many) school age people with English as a first language simply can't spell. I suppose I could rant on about the fact that my schooling, without computers at all, was better and that students actually learned skills that encouraged thinking, such as being able to do simple calculations on paper or in one's head, but I won't because I don't really know the answer. I do see my own ability to spell has receeded in recent years, and my ability to do quick, off the cuff calculations has dwindled but that might as well be age as well as heavy computer use.

    Most if not all students these days write their essays on computers and having to write everything on paper would take far too much time. The world has changed and life without computers would be all but impossible these days, irrespective or whether they are Macs or PCs. It definitely is true that most businesses use Windows and knowledge of Office is worthwhile, but will this be true in 10 or 15 years time? There is a good chance that much of the developing world and a good portion of the developed world will be using Linux by then, which will always be cheaper than Windows, and definitely will have a much larger share of business life by then. And OSX, as a Unix like platform, is better shaped to fit in there than Windows, which hasn't had any good press for a long time.
  • by crovira ( 10242 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @09:11AM (#6716540) Homepage
    Hey, they're school administrators. (Why would you listen to a high-school guidance conselor? The man's career acumen has led him to become a high-school guidance conselor. Not a glowing recommendation.)

    They don't want to have to think. And stop developping new applications too. They are still pissed off at having to teach VisiCalc (What do you mean they don't sell it anymore? Who cares anyway? Its only for school.)
  • From the trenches... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gozar ( 39392 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @10:12AM (#6716745) Homepage

    As a technology coordinator in a 2,200 student school district, I feel that articles like this are important as I plan out the future. We have 700 workstations, 94% of them are Macintosh. K-5 run OS 9, 6-12 are now running OS X.

    Some of the reasons we stay with the Mac:

    Ease of administration: Mac OS X Server and Macintosh Manager/Workgroup Manager coupled with Apple Remote Desktop makes managing this setup possible by one person. Imaging of machines is taken care of by Apple Software Restore.

    Price: A $723 eMac ($699 base + $24 for an additional 128MB of RAM). No additional license costs for: server client licenses, imaging software, and virus protection. For $500 I get an unlimited OS X server license.

    Years of Service: We can usually get 6-7 years out of a Mac. The 5400s in service all have at least 32MB of RAM and G3 upgrade cards.

    For our PC lab I made the decision to move to K12LTSP [k12ltsp.org]. These machines were aging PII with 32MB of RAM. a $2,500 dual xeon machine brought this lab back to life for around $100 a machine. I use IceWM as the window manager and installed a XP theme. They run OpenOffice.org. I had one student ask if it was Linux, the rest just blindly use it. :-)

    Most of the administrative office uses Windows 2000.

    The best tool for the job.

  • by Sans_A_Cause ( 446229 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @10:24AM (#6716799)
    I'm a University professor in the U.S. who is a longtime Mac user. Mac OS X has made life really great in my lab. We do research that tends to be graphics-oriented, and much of the scientific software that used to require overpriced SGI boxes (and licenses) to run, we now run either on Macs or Linux workstations. The nice part is that for the students in the lab, OS X and Linux look exactly the same, so figuring out one makes it simple to switch to the other.

    Obviously, the Mac GUI is much better than KDE or Gnome, so most people want the Mac, and on things like our Beowulf cluster we use Linux (I'm not paying for 32 copies of Mac OS X). I don't think I'm alone. I've talked to other colleagues who are moving to Macs for these same reasons: easy integration of OS X and Linux.

    I took a tour of campus last week as part of an orientation group. The university had just purchased hundreds of iMacs! There are G4's in almost all of the graphics labs, or anywhere that graphics demands are high.

    This high school may be preparing kids better for "industry" with MS products, but it doesn't seem to me they're preparing them well for college, given the trend I see.
  • Reality Check (Score:3, Informative)

    by jdhutchins ( 559010 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @10:45AM (#6716900)
    I've read some of the comments, and most people don't seem to get it. 99% of kids don't WANT to learn C, C++, terminal usage, etc... To most of the kids in school, computer = WINDOWS. They've heard of Mac, maybe Linux, but they don't care. And for the most part, windows is what will be used in whatever their future job is. The small portion of people who want to use linux will use it at home, and have no problems switching to windows at school.

    At my school (high school), there are a kabillion windows machines. The newspaper area uses macs, but other than that, it's all windows. People know how to use it. Computers are almost like cars these days. You don't have to know how an engine works to drive a car. Most peole don't want to know how the engine works, they just know "there's the steering wheel, the brake's on the left, gas is on the right, and the shifter is somewhere". Like it or not, Windows is by far the most dominant operating system on desktops today, and that isn't likely to change. People don't care what OS is on their computer, and they'll take whatever the manufactor gives them.
    • So you say your high school is almost all Windows because "People know how to use [Windows]."

      You then go on to say that computers are like cars-- cars have the brake, gas, shifter, and steering wheel. You assert that if someone can drive one car, they can drive practically any car because they have a grasp of the concepts of its operation.

      So by your own argument, anyone who knows how to use Windows should be able to effectively use a Mac or Linux (with GUI) system with a minimum of effort, because it's ju
  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @12:43PM (#6717560)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Sunday August 17, 2003 @10:48PM (#6720256) Homepage Journal
    I can't recall how many white-collar executive types in schools I've encountered that think Apple computers are worth a damn. The problem stems from the fact that few of these types of people actually have any actual teaching experience. There are fewer and fewer supers anymore that have actually been a teacher at some point in their career. I can think of more than one that my actual school district has had that had practically NO teaching experience. Instead they came from a business background. Lets face it; Macs still don't have a good foothold in the business world. The early business apps were not on Macs. Once business IT gets it in their minds that Macs aren't for business it's next impossible to change their ways. I've been a Mac guy for many years now and have now worked for 3 educational institutions. 1 school district (primarily the elementary school) and two state universities. Macs dominated the elementary school until I left. After I left the district hired a Novell person who of course switched everything to NT and Novell. Nevermind the fact that the elementary school was one of the first K-6 buildings with every classroom on the Internet. Nevermind the fact that the elementary school had over 175 applications running from a central Mac application server without a hitch and was maintained by a single person (the high school had 8, not counting Solitaire and Minesweeper). Nevermind the fact that those machines cost the district half the price of the PCs the new tech coordinator purchased the year after I left and has had a TOC (total cost of ownership) more than quadruple the TOC of the elementary school's Macs.

    One thing that has always amazed me is how much the elementary school teachers have integrated their Macintosh computers into their curriculum. Those 1995 Apple Macs are still in use in their classrooms today and are still play a key role in the students' coursework. High school teachers in the same district that have had new computers every 2-3 years rarely touch their computers. Computers are what they tell their students to go use when they want to right a paper. Their computers play no role whatsoever in the classroom even when they have a much newer, much more powerful computer than their primary education counterparts. It baffles me sometimes. Strike that. It baffles me all the time. If the elementary school had only half the IT budget the high school gets, the elementary students would graduate from 6th grade with an even richer technology experience. Of course they would be sorely disappointed once they reached junior high at the other school. Still I think it would benefit them in the long run.

    I can understand how an administrator can initially believe Macs are sub-par. What I don't understand is how a person like that who obviously doesn't have an open mind can stay in a key position such as that over an educational institution. Don't get me wrong. I do think PCs have an intrigal part of a child's education. I also think that Macs have just as equal a part in their education and I don't see how administrators in education can be so short-sighted that they can't see that.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]

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