Application-Centricity in Our Schools?

bccomm asks: "Here on Slashdot, we continually hear about new successes in bringing free software closer to the desktop. What about schools? I am a student and was once asked to redo an entire presentation because I had used Prosper instead of PowerPoint. The explanation I received from him was 'the curriculum says I'm supposed to teach Word, PowerPoint, etc, not word processing and presentations.' How is this for irony: presentation has to be about volunteer work/hobbies, and I chose to show that my computer runs a daily NetBSD snapshot. I think it just lost some effectiveness. Is anyone else bothered by this?"

Comments

App- / language-centricity as a quality metric

[melquiades]

Many opinionated people would say, perhaps prejudicially, that the job of any teaching institution that is not explicitly a vocational/technical training program is to teach principles and not isolated methods; that a good curriculum implements goals which could be accomplished to equal effect with many different tools; that in the rapidly changing landscape of the computer world, such a teaching approach is the only one that's likely to have any serious long-term benefit to students; and that the presence or absence in the curriculum of restrictions to specific applications, OSes, and programming languages is actually good indicator of the quality of a program.

As it happens, I am such a person. Give these bozos hell.