[Ilugc] Kerala logs Microsoft out of schools
- From: binand@xxxxxxxxx (Binand Sethumadhavan)
- Date: Sun Sep 3 05:15:50 2006
On 02/09/06, Chakkaradeep C C <chaks.yoper@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I totally agree.A student needs to be educated with every technology out
there. Today, OSS is not in the syllabus, so we should see that Govt. puts
them in, but not by removing M$. Which student will refuse job given to him
in a Big Company here in India ?
Can you tell me ONE company in India or elsewhere that employs a
person SOLELY on the basis of what he/she learnt in his/her < 10th "IT
@school" class?
I would say, If Kerala Govt. is totally removing M$ syllabus from the
curriculum, they are doing a BIG Mistake. Instead,they could include both
OSS and M$ subjects equally.
I think people here are assuming this IT @school to be something that
teaches kids programming, web development, what not. It is not. It is
just a few fundamentals of computers - check, for example, one
question paraphrased from last year's (2006) public examination:
- Create a new document. Save it with a given name in a location specified.
- Enter some text into the document. Run the spellchecker.
- Mark certain sections of this text in bold, some other sections in italics
- etc...
I really don't understand what the hullabaloo is if the government
decides that the kids can do all this very well in OO.o on Linux. How
does this make the kid unemployable?
In my mind, the computers in schools for sub-tenth kids serve a
similar function as the "instrument box" or graph paper - it is just a
tool to teach the kids the basic principles - foundation stones for
his/her higher education, the real education that prepares him/her for
professional life. Does the fact that a kid uses a particular brand of
instrument box improve his understanding of the concepts behind
"bisect an angle using a straight-edge and compass"? It doesn't.
Similarly, it doesn't really matter to the kid or the school whether
he used Firefox or IE to look up a piece of information on Wikipedia -
what matters is that the kid has access to Wikipedia from his/her
school. The goverment(s) of Kerala needs to be lauded for initiating
an IT @school project - and while doing that, if they went for cutting
costs by choosing Free Software instead of expensive commercial
alternatives, then so be it.
Binand
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