The schools job is to some extent teach what is used outside of schools. If they want to add some other things that would make sense to me, but not abandon a highly used tool.
I feel like pushing another path via schools would be wonky as well. I really would hate to have schools actively try to be the arbiter of what people should use rather than reflect the marketplace.
Every school in my city used to pirate every Microsoft product there is. I was taught how to pirate their stuff as a part of my curriculum. Now they don't, but now they're tied to Office 365 via a multi-year contract.
Nobody knew they were looking to make things legal beforehand, so nobody could offer them LibreOffice installation and support before Microsoft. There were no calls for proposals or public discussions, just news stories after the contract got signed. Us who knew better were genuinely baffled by what we could have done to avoid this situation.
Still the market is what it is and I'd rather the schools follow it for the most part rather than try to lead, partly because schools are not qualified to make these decisions.
Not everyone needs to know the alternatives, but people with my title are in the perfect position to lead the way. The alternative (as in, MS products in general) is pretty much just bashing our heads against the wall repeatedly and crossing our fingers in hope that a reinstall would fix things.
MS products work fine if our goal is to have returning customers. If it's someone closer than that (and willing to actually listen), they end up with Ubuntu (+ Skype), and the problem goes away permanently.
Does the fact that 'the market place' is clearly manipulating the decision makers temper your hate somewhat?
> ... because schools are not qualified to make these decisions.
By schools, do you mean various nation states' departments of education? Because policy (and curriculum) is set there, not at 'the schools'.
And government education agencies tend to be highly conservative in their thinking, partly out of political expediency, partly because of the trend towards vocational training. There's also the ridiculously long lead times in effecting any kind of policy change within education, no incentives to regularly reconsider alternatives, ease of submitting to the market's desires, etc
In any case, I disagree. Schools / education agencies need to be making these decisions, if not in whole then at least in part, as 'keep doing what we did yesterday' is horrendous policy if it's not backed up by empirical evidence.
And in this specific example, teaching students how to consume software, rather than how to discover -- or rather, removing any option to explore by insisting on non-free tools -- is failing their duty of care.