I just graduated from high school last year, and I completely agree with the clip, and am highly annoyed that my high school, among others, introduce students to Microsoft only products, and do not even touch computer science.
Unlike what some other people in this thread have said, I believe high schools should go further in depth: high schools should require students to take courses in abstract programming concepts, to build upon simple word processing concepts (which can just as easily be taught in OpenOffice) learned at an even younger age.
Programs like OpenOffice are as simple as Microsoft word to use, and support many platforms, which could open schools up to using *nix, which in turn could help students get acquainted with a more technical computing environment. Why? because computing is becoming part of everyone's lives, and for a lot of people, a career.
Many jobs exist which require people to sit in front of a computers almost every day of their lives, and many of those people do not have a clue as to what is going on behind the scenes of their user environment. If they encounter an obstical all they know how to do is complain, or ask someone else for help. For those people, (say, a lawyer writing a legal document) why should they not have to know anything more than the interface of a closed source word processor? In the future computer devices are going to be all over the place, in watches, cereal boxes, cellphones, etc. and people are going to have to interact with these devices quickly and efficiently.
Several hundred years ago most people did not know how to read, it was not a required skill. Now people are expected to have the ability to read, write and comprehend text, why should computing be different? A move to open source in our schools, along with actually teaching programming basic programming concepts would give all students the ability to look at, and improve upon the software that is already a compilation of 1000s of peoples' works.
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I just graduated from high school last year, and I completely agree with the clip, and am highly annoyed that my high school, among others, introduce students to Microsoft only products, and do not even touch computer science.
Unlike what some other people in this thread have said, I believe high schools should go further in depth: high schools should require students to take courses in abstract programming concepts, to build upon simple word processing concepts (which can just as easily be taught in OpenOffice) learned at an even younger age.
Programs like OpenOffice are as simple as Microsoft word to use, and support many platforms, which could open schools up to using *nix, which in turn could help students get acquainted with a more technical computing environment. Why? because computing is becoming part of everyone's lives, and for a lot of people, a career.
Many jobs exist which require people to sit in front of a computers almost every day of their lives, and many of those people do not have a clue as to what is going on behind the scenes of their user environment. If they encounter an obstical all they know how to do is complain, or ask someone else for help. For those people, (say, a lawyer writing a legal document) why should they not have to know anything more than the interface of a closed source word processor? In the future computer devices are going to be all over the place, in watches, cereal boxes, cellphones, etc. and people are going to have to interact with these devices quickly and efficiently.
Several hundred years ago most people did not know how to read, it was not a required skill. Now people are expected to have the ability to read, write and comprehend text, why should computing be different? A move to open source in our schools, along with actually teaching programming basic programming concepts would give all students the ability to look at, and improve upon the software that is already a compilation of 1000s of peoples' works.