Verily I say unto thee, that Ian Hilliard spake thusly:
> The simple fact is that schools teach how to use particular products
> instead of teaching the logic on which these products are based.
The education system is being abused as both a venue for the endorsement
of a single company's commercial product, and (essentially) as a kind of
private training facility which trains people how to use that product to
the exclusion of all others. That is the net effect, but only because of
Microsoft's monopoly.
Using commercial products in the classroom is not inherently in conflict
with the better interests of academia, they are just tools to accomplish
a particular task, and must be built by /someone/. But when that someone
is just a single company with a global monopoly, which they abuse to the
detriment of consumers (or in this case, students), then it's a problem,
because the overall effect is that this "tool" becomes a device by which
that monopolist further enforces its monopoly; consumers are deprived of
choice; and students are /indoctrinated/ rather than taught because that
"knowledge" is little more than commercial advertising.
Education should be built on /standards/, not specific products, and the
education provided should teach /principles/, not just specific methods.
Exclusively using Microsoft's software to teach students is particularly
unhealthy, because of Microsoft's tendency to pervert standards, for the
purpose of tying those perverted standards to their products. This fact,
combined with Microsoft's criminal record, should be more than enough to
persuade educators to reject Microsoft's software in the classroom.
> The problem is that the teaching staff, like many others, cannot
> separate computing from Microsoft products.
As witnessed (and exposed) by Ken Starks quite recently, there is a real
problem of institutionalised bigotry in the education system, that seems
to be based on ignorance induced by indoctrination. One would have hoped
that educational institutions, of all places, would be more enlightened,
but apparently we live in an era where teachers think Freedom is illegal
... and universities claim the exclusive "right" to "own" other people's
knowledge, so it's little wonder they choose to support Microsoft - that
champion of intellectual slavery.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
| the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
| weeks after initial exposure to Lisp." ~ Constantine Vetoshev
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
10:30:26 up 62 days, 18:13, 5 users, load average: 0.32, 0.09, 0.02
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