Awkward Utopia

I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way.

So said Jobs last Friday, speaking at an education reform conference. This isn’t the first time Jobs has criticized unions. In an interview from April 1995:

The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.

The interviewer responds, “Some people say that this new technology maybe a way to bypass that. Are you optimistic about that?” Jobs: “I absolutely don’t believe that.” Technology cannot displace the existing bureaucracy. From an interview in 1996:

Now, Jobs flatly concludes, technology can’t help fix the problems with our education system. His new solutions are decidedly low-tech.

The new Steve Jobs scoffs at the naïve idealism of Web partisans who believe the new medium will turn every person into a publisher. The heart of the Web, he said, will be commerce, and the heart of commerce will be corporate America serving custom products to individual consumers. The implicit message of the Macintosh, as unforgettably expressed in the great “1984″ commercial, was Power to the People. Jobs’s vision of Web objects serves a different mandate: Give the People What They Want.

Micheal Dell also spoke at the education reform conference on Friday, although he had a different take on unions:

Dell responded that unions were created because “the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good. …So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed.”

Here is a chart comparing Apple’s stock price to Dell’s. The default view is the past three days. Select a longer time period like 10y or 5y.