Over Christmas break (on the long travel between my home and my home—Lancaster and Mt. Vernon, IN), I listened to the new biography on Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. You should read this book. Few people have more to transform and humanize the interaction of man and machine than Jobs. His legacy is mammoth, and I believe that the impact of his work will reverberate into the future (his impact might only be at its beginning at present!). I am going write a few blog post on my reaction to the book and to Jobs. I knew little about him going in and came away from the book surprised by some of what I learned. First:
Steve Jobs life and impact is a great argument for classical Christian education—an education with encourages the students to think through what it means to be human.
Let me set aside a few objections at the start. Of course, Jobs was not a believer. He was in fact an amalgamation of a 60s radical flower child (prone to some of the weirdest diets and fads and superstitions believing in them to the obvious harm of his body at points) and an Islamic Imam who was only content with ultimate and absolute control. He was not orthodox in any way. His treatment of people was at points reprehensible, rude, and unrighteous—and necessary in order to achieve the results he desired. His life and beliefs were far from the faith.
How then, you might ask, can his life and work form an argument for classical Christian education?!?! Here is how! He was conscious of why he created such earthshaking products. He was a good engineer. He was not a great engineer. Steve Wozniak, with Jobs the co-founder of Apple, was much more of an nuts and bolts (or RAM and circuit) engineer. Jobs surrounded himself with the best engineers, but his talent was in having the vision to see how products must be made in order to work well for humans. He humanized products. He demanded that they be usable and even intuitively usable by regular human beings. He pushed his engineers and designers past their ability and into their imagination to produce machines that fit humanity. In this way, his closest analog is a guy like Frank Lloyd Wright—another genius whose brilliance grew from an understanding and rabid commitment to building human-useful buildings.
What is very interesting is that Jobs, who lived in and transmitted a sort of distortion of reality (called by friends and foes the “reality distortion field”), knew why he could create better, more useful products than his competitors. It was because he understood the Liberal Arts. He knew that by asking the question: “How will a human use this?” and “Can a human use this intuitively?” He was bound to outstrip (by miles) what others who mainly focused on technology and only secondarily on the interface of technology and humanity. He was self-aware of this difference and gloried in it.
This is exactly the sort of education that we hope to give to students. Not all will receive all that we wish to give (more on this later) but it give them a chance and pushes them toward the junction of the liberal arts and whatever else they are producing. Who knows what the future holds? We can know this, however, if you have a good grasp on what humans are and have a deep commitment to creating products that are winsomely useful for real live humans. If you are able to win people over rhetorically by the intuitive feel of your products, you have a great advantage over your competitors…and you have a better chance of creating something that reflects the glory of God because it will reflect the glory of image of God.
