Apple Store Field Trips Combine Marketing & Education

Image credit: Josh Helfferich

Back in October, blogger John Gruber wrote off the Apple Retail Store Field Trip program for K-12 schools, calling the taint of education with consumer advertising “sickening” and “appalling.”

Over the weekend, however, Fraser Spiers, a teacher in the UK, posted an account of the field trip his class took to an Apple Store across the pond that makes Gruber’s dismissal seem mean and wrong.

According to Spiers’ account, “The teacher in charge considered that the lesson had been very well designed from an educational perspective and was very appropriate for the age and stage the children were at.” Students were provided a half dozen computers in the store and given instruction on making podcasts in GarageBand, including using Photo Booth to add chapter artwork and burning the CD in iTunes. At the end of the trip each student came away with a CD of their finished podcast and a free t-shirt.

While it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical about corporate interests getting too closely involved in education, Apple’s field trip program isn’t exactly egregious on the scale of, say, ChannelOne, the 12-minute television program seen daily by an estimated eight million public school students in the United States. Studies of ChannelOne programming found that 20 percent of its air time is spent on coverage of ”recent political, economic, social and cultural stories,” while the other 80 percent is advertising, sports, weather and natural disasters.

Given Apple’s longstanding relationship with and loyal embrace by the K-12 education market in the US, together with the fact that kids get what Speirs described as “a high quality and low cost afternoon trip that the children thoroughly enjoyed and learned from,” I’d have to come down on the side of giving the company props for offering a unique and valuable service.