[Lust] Schools rant

[Steven Goodwin]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 08:27:24AM +0100, Robin Smith wrote:
> I went to the open evening last night for Verulam Boys School in St 
> Albans and during the visit I went to their IT section. It's almost all 
> Microsoft there with the exception of some Java. The courses were on 
> Access, Excel, Powerpoint... I asked why they did this and they said it 
> was the cheapest!
> 
> What they are teaching is not IT but how to do some commercial packages 
> - very disappointing.

It's more disappointing to know that this is not uncommon. Since many
employers want "skills with Word" and not "word processing" (they don't
see a difference) the students are being trained up for a MS-led
workplace which is, alas, more common. They should be shown
alternatives, but they're generally not :(

The fact MS subsidize school computers and their applications is a bonus
for them.
 
> I then went to the Geography department and was speaking to one of the 
> teachers, he mentioned that they don't have enough money for a GIS 
> system so I to mentioned that you could get a free one - PostGIS . I 
> suspect that it would be hard to get them to implement it as they would 
> need buy-in from their IT support who I doubt would want to take on 
> another platform - Linux - .

Do any of the Live CDs have PostGIS? Would that help?

Steev