Here in my region in Spain (~5M people), all school computers come with a custom Linux distro, and only for some professional education courses they have Windows (for "real world" specialized software with no Linux alternative).
I'm puzzled why kids have to do paper work using office suites and powerpoint presentations. For me these tools, especially MS Word, are from the 20th century where your intention was to prepare a document for printing out on paper, something I very rarely do in this decade.
I know my now-17-yo had to learn MSO basics as part of "informatics" in 6th-8th grade, which made me furious as I found it time not spent well, and inappropriate for a high school curriculum.
Why? Businesses run on Office docs, spreadsheets, and powerpoints, and conceivably will for the next 30 years, until everybody who came up under the current regime ages out of management positions. At which point the next generation will have been inculcated with Officisms, and so the cycle will repeat, perhaps losing a bit of steam in each cycle.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to swap over almost everything that we currently use Word for to just be some combination of Markdown and HTML, but beating my head against the inertia and trying to get people to invest an hour or two of time in learning something they don't already know is demoralizing.
We have both in our school (Bavaria, Germany) MS Office and Libre Office. You are free to use what you want but you get thought Libre Office (or Open Office ~7y ago).
Presumably because of the party involved. We are talking about the Microsoft here. Its like asking why people are trying to paint Roman Polanski as a pervert.
No it would be like suggesting that Polanski directed the Pianist so that he could sleep with the children cast in the movie.
MS is a convicted monopoly abuser. But that doesn’t mean every action of theirs is an abuse of their monopoly (further being publicly convicted and penalized for it, odds are they are less likely to do things that abuse their monopoly position).
"further being publicly convicted and penalized for it, odds are they are less likely to do things that abuse their monopoly position"
This is a wholly fictional understanding of how people and companies work. People who have transgressed moral and legal boundaries are more likely to do so again.
By your understanding a former violent rapist would be a safer date than an average person.
The idea is that children learn concepts, not individual implementations. And since Writer is arguable better than MS Word I see lots of institutions moving to LibreOffice.
Note, however, that Excel is better than Calc for anything non-trivial, and Powerpoint just blows the LibreOffice counterpart away completely. Praise to Writer is _not_ praise to the whole LibreOffice suite.
A lot of schools have also switched to google docs. Free and easy for kids to use to get the concepts. And much easier for the schools than Libreoffice.
I would not want my child to learn Excel/Calc at all, so that doesn't bother me. :-) While spreadsheets have been very sticky, super-useful for quick calculations, they are often abused for a variety of cases where alternative tools would be better. If I could, I would ban installation of Excel and Calc at my workplace!
Hope LibreOffice Impress improves over the time to catch up with PowerPoint.
digital spreadsheets - without macros - are arguably the simplest form of functional programming you could teach anyone, so i wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.
Spreadsheets are immensely useful. In many situations they are more useful in specific tasks than software designed specifically for those tasks, because their general nature means that they can be used to do things beyond what the creator of the designed software intended.
People don’t use Excel for everything because they are masochists. Excel very often really is the best solution available for a very wide variety of uses.
> The idea is that children learn concepts, not individual implementations
I fully agree, but why wouldn't you teach these concepts using an implementation that the vast vast majority of children will use in their adult life?
You could teach kids how to use a computer using OpenBSD, it's arguably better than Windows and I'm use a lot of institutions use it. It's just not very useful to the overall majority of kids who do not go into a comp-sci field.
> but maybe students accustomed to LibreOffice can push the change
But... why? For 99.9% of students Word is all they need. There are not many compelling reasons to not teach the software people will actually use in the real world.
I mean, why not eschew the English language in schools and teach kids Swahili? Maybe students accustomed to Swahili can push the change. Or maybe not.
> But... why? For 99.9% of students Word is all they need.
MS Office is especially better than LibreOffice with Excel and PowerPoint. If all you use is Word, then the licence you have to pay to use it might not be worth the difference with Writer.
> There are not many compelling reasons to not teach the software people will actually use in the real world.
Well, I do use MS Office in "the real world", and LibreOffice at home. When I landed in my company, we got a mandatory session of "advanced" Excel and Powerpoint usage, because that's inexpensive for the company to spend a day or two to make sure we can use the tools adequately rather than betting high school taught us.
Not everyone uses MS Office in "the real world", nor in "the business world". Most of the document we receive and send is in PDF format.
> I mean, why not eschew the English language in schools and teach kids Swahili? Maybe students accustomed to Swahili can push the change. Or maybe not.
Come on, I'm quite positive we can both be smarter than that :)
It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be the same. For most people, they pretty much are the same.
Ideally they would switch around every few months, so they can raise users who actually know the general principles behind their tools and don't get completely lost by minor interface changes.
Do you really feel that paying to teach someone a particular office suite prepares them for the working world? Anyone who has once learned the basics of computer use and has used an office suite can become accustomed to buttons being in a different menu and different shortcuts rather easily.
Every company out there is kind of forcing you to use Office, unless you are in the privileged few. So yes, it has become a tax in practice, since it's expected everywhere - even with government interaction which is particularly insidious.