Linux should be a part of School Education

I think this is a great idea. My secondary school (UK) actually had a wealth of voccational subjects. From the age of 13 I studied Cisco, Red Hat and then Oracle DB. By 16 I had a CCNA. Oracle Certified DBA and a few vendor certifications like Security+ and Network+

The real issue was Universities acknowledge them as points towards UCAS so practically everyone on the course ended up staying on another year or two and studied other subjects to get the necessary points.

I'm hopeful that one day the system will cater for more subjects but its a long way way at least in the UK.

What a complete load of tosh. Education is about teaching children valuable skills they can apply in their daily lives. How many of them would ever see a PC running Linux again? The cost argument doesn't really stand up either, books cost money and 'do nothing but line the pockets of the publishers' to paraphrase the author. It's not as if computers running Linux cost nothing either.

If Linux is going to find a place in mainstream education, it's going to have to earn it. This is of course quite possible. Raspberry Pi is a good example of this. I can see Linux forming a valuable part of a more advanced secondary school computing curriculum too.

The article is living in the past though. Many children now, and many more in then future will equate computers with tablets. Some will run iOS, others will run Android and maybe some might even run Windows. Decisions about which solution best serves the educational needs of children should be in the hands of educators, not technological partisans.

I don't wish to hijack this thread but tying the Raspberry Pi to education is terrible if you ask me.

I agreed about the Raspberry Pi being the best device for education right from day one. That was until my father bought my daughter one for her birthday and I ended up being the resident "fix it guru" for it.

The thing teaches you merely how to jump through funny shaped hoops to get something working rather than anything realistic or helpful. Most of it is google-fu and copy and paste. When you do finally get there it's a baron land of absolutely unrealistic, undocumented crud that can't self-serve. Plus it barely works and browns out to start with resulting in USB-hub jiggery-pokery (and that only happens because I actually understand how USB works).

For ref, I have 20 years' of Unix and Linux experience (right down to writing kernel drivers) and it was painful getting it off the ground so I'm not approaching it blind.

Being critical (constructively!) of this results in the RPI forum thread being deleted which in itself an affront and a general recommendation against the things.

One should teach children using the best tools for the job; cost should not be an issue here in the consideration. What is the quality of educational software in the Linux world compared to Windows? What about compared to OS X? What about usability? Accessibility? A rather vapid statement about "cost" isn't going to cut it as an argument as to why Linux should be used.

Even amongst Free operating systems, why Linux? What are the advantages compared to FreeBSD, or OpenBSD, FreeDOS, or ReactOS? In an article like this, you need more than a few vague statements to back it up ideology, you need evidence and proof that Linux is the best route.

Oh my (hypothetical) God. For a moment there I thought this was The Linux Foundation (not federation.)

Coming to the topic at hand: This reeks of fanboyism and fanaticism. While I personally agree that young people should be introduced to more than Windows as a part of their edution in computing, this is taking the rhetoric too far.