&gt; Are schools afraid of really educating their students, as opposed to making them dependents of Apple&#x27;s consumer culture?<p>I think a key component to the problem here is the very clear gap between computing enthusiasts&#x2F;application developer and your typical K-12 teacher. Which is really not meant to be a knock on our teachers, but I don&#x27;t think your typical school has the people with the right skill sets to teach &quot;true&quot; computing.<p>They don&#x27;t realistically have any choice but to rely on the watered-down end user version experienced through the walled-garden of one vendor or another. Which makes most &quot;technology in the classroom&quot; initiatives to me look more like solutions in search of a problem (ie. not a very effective use of district resources).