More than anyone in the last 30 years, Steve Jobs realized that the bridge between technology and humans was art. Like Henry Ford, he strived to make his inventions accessible and affordable to the average American. Jobs was as much an artist as he was an entrepreneur, and I believe that he cared more about creating computers that were intrinsically pleasing and served as an extension of our will than he cared about making money.
Some of the first computers on the market 25 years ago were Orwellian monsters indeed. I think of my first Atari. Everytime I wanted to run a program I would have to stick in a floppy disk, boot it up, wait, let it crash and then start all over again. Even worse, both the computer and I viewed this as a necessary requirement before anything of substance could be accomplished! Work with computers resembled a high-tech sumo wrestling match: I pushed, the computer pushed back; I grew red in the face and the computer seemed to relish my distress. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I would have rather have opened Pandora’s Box than hit the on button on those early computers that provided all the ease, flexibility and creativity of a pillory.
Steve Jobs understood my frustration and that of millions. During his life he helped develop the first Apple Macintosh computer, iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone – among many other innovations. The vision was to create tools that were intrinsically enjoyable to humans and allow them to not only get a job done, but to do it creatively. Jobs’s corporate mantra was “focus and simplicity.” He wanted his devices to be simple to use and pleasing to the senses.
If you watch his Stanford Commencement Address in 2005, a couple of important points come right to the surface. Jobs was a college dropout who followed his passions. Even though he had a passion for calligraphy that many practical people would see as useless as a love for eight-track tape repair, it helped pave the way for his creation of beautiful and elegant fonts that would become a key feature of the early Macintosh computers. Getting fired from Apple early in his career allowed him to develop cutting edge animations skills at Pixar – skills that he would use to create some of his company’s most innovative devices when he returned to Apple as CEO in 1997. His parting advice to the graduates was to “stay foolish; stay hungry.” Foolish means that young people should be encouraged to think outside of the box, to bring new ways of thinking to peculiar problems; stay hungry means to never rest on your laurels – keep creating, keep searching, and shun complacency.
Not only did Steve Jobs revolutionize our technological world, his willingness to share some of the principles that helped him achieve success should help educators realize that it’s more than just reading, writing, and math skills which are key to a student’s future success – it’s also promoting creativity, beauty, art, eccentricity, among other things – that will help shape the people who will walk in Steve Jobs’s footsteps. I wonder how I would change my teaching if somehow I knew that the world’s next great innovator was sitting in my classroom.