Re: Linux in the Education System

[Doin' the bull dance, feelin' the flow...]

> Hi fellow Linux Advocates,  what do u think of including Linux as part of
> the curriculum for the Education System in Singapore for primary and
> secondary school level ? This will involve teaching students the basics of
> ftp, sendmail, etc step-by-step.  Awaiting your opinions.  Cheers.

Not a bad idea.  Being a recent product of American schooling, I know that
I learned nothing about computers at all.  For something that is supposed
to be rapidly becoming one of the most important things in the world
(computing in general that is), schools here kind of ignore it.

When I had Macs in elementary school, even the teachers had no clue what
was going on.  It took a few of us kids an hour after school one day to
teach him how to do it and we had never used them before.  Kids will
always be receptive to computers in general - more so than adults at
least.  As we grew (for better or for worse) to have Windoze equipped
machines in school, more people knew how to use them...but only at a vert
superficial level.  Anything more than getting into a word processor
seemed a bit too complicated for everyone.

That's why if you teach something like Linux in schools, regardless of
what country you're in, you have to be careful that you aren't just
teaching them the basic things like how to use ftp.  They should
understand it as well.  Give a student at least the basics of what makes
ftp work, what an IP adress is, what protocols like TCP/IP are, then show
them FTP.  It'll let them appreciate it more.  And don't just give them
XWindows...show them how to set it up and explain what it all means.  Just
giving a student instruction on how to type "ls" instead of "dir" at the
little prompt doesn't do him or her any more good than giving them a mouse
and having them point at the stupid little Start button and routinely go
to Word.

Just my thoughts...(and I don't have many of them over Christmas break...)

:-)

-Evan-