Total bollocks...

The idea that there is an IT solution to teaching problems is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know what Mcnealy is angling for, either handing over more money to profiteers like himself so he can keep pushing over-priced Sun kit to run all this rubbish on. Okay the textbooks are rubbish but this is hardly a position that can't be fixed. If the books are crap then have them rewritten, better edited and introduce so academic quality control. California is the seventh wealthiest economy on Earth, more than most nation states, so there's hardly a problem with not having the money.

But the whole plan is just rubbish. Having all text books in a digital format would have enormous capital costs. Consider at the moment all the UK secondary schools are spending nearly £100,000 a year on IT, increasing at nearly 20% a year (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000480/SFR27-2004v6.pdf). There are more than 3,500 secondary schools in the UK (http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/ofsted/seced/chap-1.htm). So we're spending more than £318 million a year to provide about 200 computers per school. Those costs don't even include primary or special schools. Therefore each computer roughly costs £443. So considering there are nearly 4 million children in secondary education (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_social/Social_Trends37/Social_Trends_37.pdf), this would require a computer/pupil ratio of 1:1 if we're replacing textbooks so at £443 per computer would cost £1,772,000,000 which buys an awful lot of textbooks.

As for BBC Jam being free, of course is wasn't free but the BBCs charter say that it must be a public service broadcaster to educate and inform. It seems to me that BBC Jam was a lot closer to its original remit that 99% of the other shite the corporation spews out. Is anyone going to seriously argue that using £150 million to help educate children isn't a good use of taxpayers money or would you rather (a) see that handed over to profiteers who'll hand in a product three times worse, twice as expensive and have no democratic accountability or (b) use the money to puke out more shite like EastEnders or Any Dream Will Do?