Hello Arthur, Sunday, October 30, 2005, 12:04:01 PM, you wrote:
A> Our schools are not "worker training" institutions. Never have been - A> overtly. They are educational institutions. Knowledge transfer of the kind A> that is appropriate to high school is by its nature more generic and general A> than then anything the .Net platform is about. <snip> A> But I am a schoolmarm, when it comes to schools. The entire point of my A> relentless efforts to reach you is that what is appropriate in Industry and A> the Market Place is not what is appropriate in the context of education and A> schooling. A> And making great headway in my efforts to be convincing, I sense ;) I feel a need to weigh in here, even before reading any further responses in this thread. I agree very strongly with Arthur's statements. I think it's okay for a company to give donations to education, provided no strings are attached, but I would be happier if there were no need for such grants in the first place. Education, especially prior to the junior year of college, is about developing generalists. We need more wide-world-view thinkers everywhere. I didn't realize how strongly I felt about this until I visited a Microsoft/IBM sponsored "university" in Salt Lake a year ago February. They give students a B.S. in CS after 2.5 years of close to full-time work (and charge an arm and a leg to do it). They prepare people tailor-trained for Microsoft and IBM. I left thinking how much they miss of a well-balanced, liberal arts flavor education that is appropriate for a baccalaureate, even a traditional one in CS. They skimp so much on non-technical subjects that it's criminal, in my opinion. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool software developer (20+ years of industrial experience), but I would never trade my broad undergraduate experience for anything (I took so many extra non-technical courses that it took me 5 years - I had 160 semester hours on my transcript). It's so important that we don't throw growing minds in to a technical tunnel. Of course, from were I sit, few want to go into technical pursuits anyway :-(. -- Best regards, Chuck _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
