I’ve Had Better Days

Yesterday was not the best of days. It started when Brenda’s old G3 iBook finally hiccuped into a blaze of colors on the display, and completely refused to recognize her mouse. A nice thing about living in Raleigh, is being less than a half-hour from an Apple Store. Even to ask for what I know is going to be an expensive repair, spending time in an Apple Store is a treat. For one thing, all of the sales staff know all of their products. Isn’t that refreshing for a technology store?

But it’s not always rosy, when I come to the realization that I am not receiving the repair service that I had expected after forking over a hundred dollars for Apple’s elite Pro Care service. I was not really that sore about having to wait, although the store should simply make their Genius Bar look a little more like a doctor’s waiting room, and spread some magazines out.

The manager finally came out to appease my rising indignation, which he effectively did, explaining the circumstances. But in the conversation (and this is the point of this story), I said, “I’ve been a loyal Apple customer for most of the last 25 years. Are you even that old?”

He smiled and replied, “Well, I’m a couple of years older than that.”

Ok, this important store (could as easily be a Dell store or the Bose store next door) was being managed by a young man who has always known digital information technology — computers.

The second half of this story is returning home and taking a minute to scan through my aggregator and discovering the story, New Jersey Grade School Institutes Iris Scanning. An elementary school of the Freehold Borough School District is guarding its halls of learning using state of the art biometric security technology. The $369,000 project is being funded by a research branch of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The district’s superintendent said that, “The idea is to improve school safety for the children,” continuing to explain that the schools swipe-card system was obsolete.

Now I don’t know the Freehold Borough School District and I don’t know the community that it serves, and there may be very good reasons why it should be scanning the irises of people who enter this elementary school. Honestly, I can imagine situations where I’d want this technology in my own children’s school, though I’d probably be moving from such an environment if I could.

My point is, what else is obsolete in that school, and nearly every other school in my country. What scares me is a country that finds $369,000 for bio-metric security for one elementary school in New Jersey, but can find no more than $3,000 (three laptops) for every other school or five bucks and some change for every student, to replace centuries-old technologies (the book) with modern information tool. That’s what frightens me.

Showing my Math

2006 EETT Funding / Number of Schools/Students

275,000,000 / 92,816 = $2962.85

275,000,000 / 48,540,725 = $5.66

4 thoughts on “I’ve Had Better Days”

  1. Great point David. My district just installed video surveillance equipment in all our buildings through funds from a Homeland Security grant. I don’t know the exact cost, but know it was a couple hundred thousand dollars.

    I find this outrageous when you look at how the federal government skimps on educational spending each year.

    At least I can sleep better now knowing how safe I am in my rural Maine school 😉

  2. Heh… and you know how worried I am about being able to find the money for a 1:1 laptop ratio. I’m going to work with our curriculum and instruction office to get them to forgo buying us textbooks so that we can use that money toward the laptop program. Wish me luck.

  3. Please please tell me I misunderstood this post. It does not say books are outdated, does it? I am ALL for integration of skillls and digital literacy–but how can anyone say a computer is more important and more valid than a book? I find that statement just as disturbing as the current state of educational funding. BOTH are tools our children will need to master the use of if they hope to find any answers.

    Perhaps I will feel more eloquent tomorrow, able to back up what I fully admit is an emotional reaction. I just can’t believe . . . I must have missed something somewhere . . .

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