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KDE Desktops For 52 Million Students In Brazil
An anonymous reader writes "Mauricio Piacentini writes about a deployment of systems running Linux and KDE in Brazil's schools; some 52 million students are to be served by this initiative. 'What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools. The software installed on these systems is "Linux Educacional 2.0," a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project.' The distro comes in Portuguese only at this time." quarterbuck notes that Linux is making other inroads in the BRIC economies (Brazil-Russia-India-China): India and China are getting a custom-designed Ubuntu laptop from Dell, and Russia is making their own Ubuntu laptop this year.
These comments demonstrate a huge flaw in education systems. They shouldn't teach children how to use Windows, MacOS, or even KDE. What they should be doing is teach them how to use operating systems, office suites, and generic user interfaces. The best platform to do that may indeed be KDE/GNU/Linux, but that should be a side issue.
How many people do you know who try to memorize menu locations for every single application they use instead of just automatically "understanding" where a good programmer would have put them? Hell, I know people who have to be retaught copy/paste for every new application. No wonder they're stuck in their ways and are afraid of change.
Unless you are teaching your students kernel architecture, you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking you're teaching them anything that is specific to Linux. The current state of basic computer education is comparable to a math curriculum in which children are taught how to count apples without explaining that you can apply the same knowledge to oranges.
And who says it should stop at at such a basic level? Regular expressions and the command line should at the very least be required high school topics. If you think I'm sounding insane, think about the difficulty level of high school math and physics. The computer is a tool everyone uses every day, and no sane person is even suggesting that math should be dumbed down. There is a huge gap between computer enthusiasts and the average person, because the schools have inexplicably picked one field to not challenge students in at all.
What if only math nerds understood geometry?
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