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Special Report

After we recently reported on the latest chapter in the Henrico County iBooks saga, we received a very informative reader email message from someone close to the action, and we now know a lot more about why students have been suspended.

To make a long tale somewhat more comprehensible, we'll remind you all that the Henrico County (Richmond) school system first made news by committing to a huge iBook order. Unfortunately, the next time we focused on the school laptop story, it was to express our incredulity at students being suspended for using the iBooks in ways their fathers and older brothers surely did at home on their own computers. That's right, downloading naughty pictures. In response, the school board asked Apple to modify the operating systems so this activity would be curtailed. Well, Apple tried -- but the kids were smarter. After we wrote about several dozen suspensions for "subverting" the modified operating systems, this is what we received:

"I am good friends with a teacher in the high schools in Henrico Co., Virginia.

Her frustration with the iBooks is pretty simple to explain. The iBooks were handed to students, with the instructions to download, copy, work with photos, mp3s, install games upon, and simply, use-the-heck-out-of them.

This led to the much feared pictures of people-without-clothing appearing on school-owned iBooks. As Lewis Grizzard once wrote, naked simply means a person with no clothes on. Nekkid refers to a person with no clothes on, who happens to be up to no good.

Let's remember, these things belong to the schools, not the students. The students paid $50 insurance on them, and have the option to buy them after three years for some ridiculously low price, perhaps $75. It's a little unseemly for school property to be carrying gigabytes of nekkid folks and mp3s, of which the legality is questionable.

So, the school system took the iBooks back, modified the OS load, placed a desktop background with a giant sticky as a warning, and life progressed, as it usually does.

The consternation of my friend derives from two problems: 1) The administration failed to listen to their teachers when considering this program. There was no pilot program conducted to see how bad the nekkid pitchers and illegal mp3s would proliferate. There was no pilot to gauge how well the restricted OS load would work. My friend, and other teachers with her, would have happily told the administration of the pitfalls. Instead, the administration has found those pitfalls the hard way.

2) The iBooks are being used in class to pass these nekkid pitchers around rather than pay attention to anything lesson-oriented. Sure, the computer is a valuable research and productivity tool. In the past 34 years that personal computers have been available, they've also been entertainment machines.

Freedom is of the utmost importance. Students have the freedom to make inappropriate choices with the property belonging to the school system. They then have to suffer the consequences of those actions. You may question the harshness of the punishment, and you may question the restrictions that have been put in place, but it sounds to me as though the students have the choice to use the equipment as it has been provided to them, or accept responsibility for stepping out of those bounds.

Ingenuity is one thing; entreprenuership is another: one young man figured out how to get around the restrictions on the new OS load, and rather than teach the others how to do it, he sells his services to the other students who want to unleash the power that's locked down.

My stance on the whole matter is, if the teachers had been solicited for comments, and a series of pilot programs run, the whole experiment could have been handled far better."

These thoughtful comments raise some very interesting issues, which we will follow up on in Part II.

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