Keep proprietary tech out of schools

I am astounded that when it comes to ICT education, some senior figures in the IT industry still don't seem to get it (Back to the drawing board for ICT education).

"The biggest challenge is for IT giants to get involved and provide the resources" is not the answer at all.

You don't want product-specific training, whether it be Visual Studio or Oracle. The students need to learn about programming and computing as a generic subject and there are ample resources for that within the open-source market. Anyway, by the time the students of today reach the workplace, most of the technology base will be open source and any application that they may have learnt will be out of date, redundant or deprecated.

Specialised applications will be learnt by an IT professional while in the workplace because that is what their employer wants them to use. Education must be about training the student so that they have the ability to learn such applications in the workplace.

Mike Ryder