[Sussex] Schools

[Simon Huggins]

Salut LUG!

On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 02:29:36PM +0000, berto wrote:
> the problem i see with this comes back to the age old argument, what
> are they used to using? Most people especially I have noticed school
> kids do not care about how x & y works they just want it to work and
> micro$oft stuff generally does that, having it so the kids use Linux
> with OO and who knows what else at school and then at home they use
> Windows and MS Office, it could cause more damage then do good. 

As with the other posters I think you're missing the point a bit.

I moved schools 3 times at primary school and each time did a different
maths course.  Different books, different ways of teaching etc.  I
remember my Mother asked if it would harm me and the response from my
teacher at the time was that no, it would only help really.  Didn't seem
to do my maths any harm at all at the 11+, GCSEs or A-Levels (admittedly
since I'm not doing much trig day to day I do seem to have lost bits of
it ;)).

I really do think teaching people how to explore different systems is a
much needed skill that is lacking in schools.  Free Software does
encourage this partly by having many different programs that you have to
choose between to find the one right for you.

If you actually let children learn some of these more generic and
questioning skills instead of always knowing that you go to this
particular menu in this program and it does it by magic then you help
them learn and get them thinking about things for themselves.

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