Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
I've no idea about Jobs though. His personal life has always been very secretive, and I would imagine any involvement with charity would be just as secretive.
> One of the great Woz quotes of all time is his half-apologetic explanation for his failure to be more aggressive about staying rich: "I don't feel attached to my money in normal ways."
> Undaunted, Woz describes for this graduating class his original vision of a technological revolution. Although he no longer designs computers, he retains something of the distracted and childlike qualities of the übernerd, and his delivery is fast, disjointed, and extremely personal.
"All of a sudden," Woz says, remembering his days at Hewlett-Packard, "affordable computers were coming! Computers that people could own! We could have them in our homes. There would be a revolution, and they'd be in every home. And we spoke in clubs, and we had a big club, and it grew to 500 members and it was huge and we just hung on every word. And the big computer companies, the ones that already existed, said, 'It's a little passing fad like ham radio. It will go away. It just doesn't matter. Nobody is going to want a computer in their home.'
"Well, that's right. The computers were ugly and they were big monstrosities and they didn't look like anything you'd want in the home. They looked like some big commercial piece of equipment with switches and things that you'd have to have a technician working in your house to keep it maintained. Our idea was that these computers were going to free us and allow us to organize. They were going to empower us. We could sit down and write programs that did more than our company's programs on their big million-dollar computers did. And little fifth-graders would go into companies and write a better program than the top gurus being paid the top salary, and it was going to turn the tables over. We were excited by this revolutionary talk.
"The club was all about giving, because back then there were no dollars in this business. It was: Give some knowledge. Write down a program you've got. Write down how to build a certain device. Offer some help. Offer some information. Offer some parts at a good price. Offer your own time."
Revolutionary excitement is always sparked when powerful information is suddenly shared. But, he goes on, this is not the mood of the computer industry today...
Wired 6.09: "The World According to Woz"
Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller, only to discover that student body size has little effect on achievement. [1]
At the expense of sounding like a troll, it amazes me that throwing tons of money at problems is commonly accepted as a noble thing. What we're lacking isn't money, it's imagination - we need new ideas for measuring achievement and improving education, and while economic power can act as a catalyst to implementing such changes, it's in no way sufficient for making a lasting positive impact on its own.
1. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_30/b41880582...
I'd trust a passionate fifth grade teacher to make good judgements of what's best for their students' education over a billionaire entrepreneur any day.
Bill Gates is, at the very least, very smart. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he's spending his considerable net worth in a way that helps.
So, the Gates foundation spent a lot of money discovering that this has little real effect on educational outcomes. I don't regard that as a waste - it may have been an expensive lesson, but I presume the money was spent on subsidizing smaller class sizes in schools. The understanding we've gained will save many billions of taxpayer dollars from being spent on a widespread but mistaken belief about teacher:student ratios, which is a significant public good.
[1] I say 'were', because now that we have evidence of the policy's ineffectiveness, many teachers' union members have designated the Gates Foundation and Obama's education secretary as evil corporatists out to wreck public education.
I can assure you that when a smart teacher who spends every day with kids says one thing about what's better for their education, and the Gates' Foundation's research says another, I have trouble seeing the validity of the latter.
What I'm saying is that yes, smaller class sizes are a requisite for a better education. Have you ever been in a classroom?
Are you suggesting Anigbrowl does not have any education ?
I have 2 problems with your approach. First, I don't want to over-rely on the reports of smart teachers. Not because I don't trust them, but because when it comes to public education we have limited financial resources, and a distribution of ability across the population of teachers. Maybe a smart teacher can consistently get better results with a smaller class. I could believe it. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a system that ensures we only hire and retain smart teachers. In matters of public policy, we are often forced to forgo optimal results for some, in order to achieve acceptable results for the system as a whole.
My second problem is more fundamental: how are we evaluating what's 'better'? If this determination is made purely by those who are most involved, then logic dictates that parents should be the ultimate arbiters of educational quality by virtue of having the greatest intimacy with their kids. Of course, we know that this is not the case in practice, because parents' commitment and ability varies very widely indeed, and so we cannot trust them as objective reporters. If we did, collage admissions officers and potential employers could simply call up an applicant's parents and ask them if the applicant would be a good candidate. In reality, we use testing of various kinds because it gives us some sort of objective yardstick with which to measure academic performance across a large population. We simply don't have the resources to fully evaluate every aspect of every individual candidate, and while statistical methods are rather dehumanizing they do offer enough predictive power to be useful.
Consider that while High School teachers express a high degree of optimism about the future academic prospects of their graduates, college teachers have been complaining more and more about the number of incoming students who need remedial classes in English or Math. Just as an excess of 'teaching to the test' may measure only test-taking ability, an excess reliance on classroom performance as reported by teachers may measure only the ability to perform in a classroom context.
It's fun and provocative to say, but do you really feel (or, I should say, think) this way? I could maybe understand if you were talking about, for example, the CEO of CitiCorp, who really doesn't give a shit about anything (compare his background vs, that of Bill Gates).
But are you actually calling out Bill Gates, and saying he's not legitimately trying to accomplish something good for the lesser blessed people in the world? Do you think he's in it for the publicity?
> I'd trust a passionate fifth grade teacher to make good judgements of what's best for their students' education over a billionaire entrepreneur any day.
Well, I don't know what to say about this. Do you actually have children, so that you've actually had to sit down and think about these types of things?
As a side note, you speak as if it's obvious that a smaller student body (and class size) doesn't equate to higher achievement. This knowledge may be more commonplace now, but the premise that smaller student bodies do equate to higher achievement has been one of the basics of school reform and school funding for some time now. Finding out the fact that this is actually a flawed assumption has a huge effect on public policy and spending on schools in the future. Maybe it's just me, but I'm glad the Gates foundation "wasted" their money finding this out because it's better than the US state and local governments continually spending (in aggregate) billions of dollars in taxpayer money on an improvement based on a flawed theory. Ideally the government would have realized this on its own much earlier, but you know how that goes....
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/11/how-rich-is-steve-job...