Excerpts from an interview published February 20, 2008 in Knowledge@Wharton.
In the years following [Apple], Wozniak sponsored two Woodstock-like music festivals known as the US Festivals in 1982 and 1983, taught computing to grade-school students, and devoted much of his time and money to philanthropic activities. His current interests include playing Segway polo -- that is, playing polo while riding the Segway Personal Transporter in lieu of a horse.
Knowledge@Wharton: It sounds like you think this is more than just having a good time. In terms of education, you seem to believe this underlies teaching people how to be creative and inventive. Wozniak: Exactly. Humor is closely related to the creativity and invention that we're born with. It's that spirit of thinking out something a little bit different -- making up your own jokes. Knowledge@Wharton: When you taught computing part-time to fifth grade students after you left Apple as a full-time employee, you said that was the most important time of your life. How so? Wozniak: It was a great time in my life for a lot of reasons. I'd been doing a bunch of philanthropy in San Jose. I felt very good about giving away my money to start good museums: Children's Discovery Museum, the Tech [Museum] of Silicon Valley, a ballet company. I had wanted to teach my whole life. I just started up a class by inviting a few kids over the phone -- one year's class had six students only. Then I moved up to 22 kids. Then I started doing multiple full classes of 20 and 30 kids. I enjoyed it so much. I was sharing something I was good at with the kids, and I was helping them make their homework better. I was not trying to make them be computer people like myself. I said: I have to reach everyone in the class, not just a few who want to be weird little geeky people. I want to reach everyone. So I taught the kids how to make their homework look good. If they were assigned [a report] I would say, "Let's do the report on the computer. Here's how we can choose the right fonts and make it look good." If they were assigned some history project [I'd say], "Let's do a timeline in the drawing program." Or, "Let's do a spreadsheet with some charts to show some data that you're analyzing." I would take the real stuff they had in school, and after school I would do [it] in my computer class. Education is so huge -- you can't have one quick solution. The solutions are very far in the future. We technologists can figure out how to get more education at a lower price. That's a big key. But the amount of money for education is always going to be too low. The government has a certain about of money to spend on things. And you think, "Oh, they're just going to determine the priorities: Here's what percentage should go to education, what percentage to the military, what percentage to forestry, what percentage to roads." But those percentages tend to map to how many votes there are. And there's a little problem in the United States: A family of five gets no more votes than a family of two. So, the families with the kids, [for whom] education is a top priority, don't have a say [proportionate to] the size of their family. Kids aren't really considered in the votes and [in the] money for education, which is just backwards. Every farmer gets to vote on farm bills. Every elderly person gets to vote on elderly issues. Schooling is a problem because young kids don't get to vote. Register Now! Event Details: September 24, 2009, 10am PDT | 1pm ET | 5pm GMT (-7:00)
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