as it could be seen by Steven Wozniak about 30 years ago:
-
My computer science courses were interesting, but I have to
criticize them a little because they taught only specific problems
with specific solutions. You spent your time memorizing standard
problems and solutions and then tried to recognize variations of
them in the tests. You weren’t supposed to explore new avenues or
try things that nobody else was doing. You were only supposed to
learn the proper answer. They thought that you could be trained to
know all the problems and the standard solutions. Once you learned
them all, you could solve them.
My economics course was interesting also. We had a socialist TA
[teaching assistant] who taught us that companies made money by
cheating the consumer. All the kids in the class thought that
companies would make a lot of profit if they could figure out a way
to cut the costs of a product down, to make it cheap and screw the
consumer.
It was wrong because they weren’t really teaching you to solve problems – they taught you to identify to cut the costs of a product down, to make it cheap and screw the consumer.
I contrast that with the way we did things at Apple. Every product
design decision was based on what consumers wanted, what would
compete the best, what they would buy. We tried to do what
customers wanted, in our best judgment, and give them high-quality
products.
So I would stand up in class and argue about what the TA was
saying. After a while he started telling me to shut up. or that he
would kick me out if I interrupted him again. Apple was the
greatest business success in history, but I couldn’t tell him who I
was.
Source: STEVE WOZNIAK INTERVIEW — BYTE MAGAZINE — DECEMBER 1984