Nothing, he said, has changed our lives over the past decade more than technology innovation. “It opens new business sectors, creates additional wealth that didn’t exist before,” he said. “That means we have greater efficiencies, which just means that we have more money left over for other things.”
Public education remains a passionate subject for Woz, who was unabashed in saying that schools today are far too structured and thus impede innovative thinking – which is key to “the artistic side” of technology.
At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.
When pressed by an audience member about how schools should judge student performance, Woz said they should be given one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.
“A really innovative person is known for something that usually took an awful lot of thinking, maybe even over years, and a lot of development in a laboratory putting it together and getting it to work. And it’s new and it’s different. And it’s not something you read about in a book,” he said.
“In school, intelligence is a measurement,” he continued. “If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you’re intelligent.”
Read the whole thing. Here are my somewhat-related thoughts on the lower education bubble.