When I was in elementary school in the early 1990s, I remember asking my parents to keep their grocery store receipts. If my school collected enough of them, the receipts could be redeemed to acquire more of the Apple IIs that populated our computer lab, which we in turn would use to draw pictures with little turtles and die of cholera in Oregon Trail. Now, as a corruption scandal wrecks the Los Angeles schools’ $1 billion plan to give every student and teacher Apple iPads loaded with Pearson Education software, I’m second-guessing my 7-year-old instinct. That L.A. School Superintendent John Deasy improperly colluded with Apple and Pearson executives, however, isn’t the biggest problem. L.A. isn't just a bad apple, so to speak. The trouble is that plying students with these machines reinforces the power that monopolistic companies wield in our society’s relationship with technology; it teaches young people, incorrectly, that there is no other way. Free and open alternatives would be better for the students, better for the tech economy and far less expensive for school districts, especially those with fewer billions to throw around than L.A. Unified. I hope Los Angeles takes the scandal as an opportunity to reconsider its entire strategy.

Easy prey

Silicon Valley has been preying on school systems since before the utility of personal computers was widely recognized. In the mid-1980s, cultural critic Theodore Roszak noticed that Apple became especially eager to get computers into schools (either by selling them or getting a tax write-off for donating them) just as the home computer market started to lose its initial momentum. Educators often bought in more out of a desire for the computer’s prestige than for any clear notion of what it could do. For Apple, at least, this turned out to be an excellent investment in product placement; a decade or two later, my generation of coupon-collecting students helped catapult the company’s rebirth as one of the most profitable in the world. “A hidden curriculum,” Roszak suspected, “arrives in the classroom with the computer.” He was worried not only about the impact of corporate marketing on students but also about the rise of a kind of education that privileges what can be done on a computer over old-fashioned thinking. Pearson, for its part, has been doing all it can to realize Roszak’s fears. The company lobbies hard for the adoption of the Common Core standards, a test-heavy curriculum that fits neatly into its business plan to thoroughly computerize education. Pearson is no stranger to impropriety as it goes about securing mega-contracts; last year it paid a $7.7 million corruption settlement in New York, and it is in court in New Mexico over a billion-dollar testing contract. The hidden curriculum, apparently, is no longer so hidden.

iPads are intuitive to use, but they can’t teach their users much about how they actually work.

Free and open