Date   : Sun, 02 Apr 2006 18:40:05 +0200
From   : "Mark Usher" <mu.list@...>
Subject: Re: Basic & BBC Basic

> I'm really glad I learnt Latin. It's had close to zero 
> practical utility but it gave me the start of an intellectual 
> toolkit that has turned into far more than a bit of 
> vocabulary in a dead language.
Glad I learnt it too. It is really useful to me at the moment, and I wish I
was fluent.

I also wish they had given me more tools for the real world, better social
skills, tools for business, power through speech, more character building
exercises, some of these things need to be addressed in education to help
the youngsters do better for themselves.
 
> I'm not talking about moral education - I'm talking about the 
> morals of building education around proprietary systems that 
> are likely to change at the market's whim.
I am only saying, what is wrong with using proprietary systems to teach
concepts? Universities have been doing it for years. Think about some of the
newest medical research machines. All proprietary, Siemens, Canon... The
list is endless, all with students learning on them - even researching using
them - that is according to your view an even worse scenario!

> So you're advocating even more training and even less education?
I am advocating a good mix of both. I have had uni grads come onto my
software team before, and they have totally screwed up on many occasion
because they have no idea about the practical world, whereas I can usually
trust someone with 3 years experience and no degree to get the job done. It
is important though to understand why things work the way they do, and to
question it also. As always, balance is the key. Teaching people with
non-proprietry systems just because they are non-proprietry is not
necessarily a good thing. Use proprietry tools to teach generic building
blocks. What is wrong with that?

So why not use a proprietary language to teach concepts that are common
across many languages used in commercial arenas. At that age, they want to
see quick and colourful results to keep their interest. Stimulate their
minds.

-Mark