Yes, this is why societies must take care about which hardware and software they use in schools. In Germany, some schools opted for Apple hardware and software, which is equally bad.
What would be better? How would one measure "betterness" anyway? If it's the probability of having to use classroom computers later in life, your choices are Windows or Apple.
Schools are not to teach children to operate specific commercial products. The school teaches the basics so the people are able to continue to learn on their own and judge products and technologies. Schools should teach on one side simple hardware architectures, encoding of data, computer representation of perceivable things, and some programming. On the other side, it should put the digital revolution into a historic context and show the dangers that arise from it and how to act as an individual and as a state in it. This way the children can grow into informed citizens.
None of that is restricted because you buy a Mac or a Windows machine. Those things subjects you have mentioned are all ideas that are totally independent to the OS.
Why does it matter if they learn them on a Mac or a Windows machine? The OS for the most part these days are irrelevant.
Because it creates a dependence on the OS they use in school, and a OS is not necessary to teach the things I mentioned. The teaching can be done abstractly on a board and paper, or with interactive games. The practice can be done with microprocessors on educational board with plenty of easily accessible I/O.
And when there is a need for an operating system, which I don't see in basic and mid-level teaching in school, schools should use libre software, because it relates to public infrastructure.
> The teaching can be done abstractly on a board and paper, or with interactive games. The practice can be done with microprocessors on educational board with plenty of easily accessible I/O.
I support the educational board use, but you're describing a different kind of class that will enable students to contextualize the history of computing, describe the fundamental paradigms of computing at an abstract level, and maybe prototype some cool demos on a breadboard, but they'd balk like cavemen at modern computers. The idea of actively shielding students from the realities of modern hardware and OSes is ludicrous to me. Should driver's ed classes limit themselves to chalkboard theory and "libre" vehicles hand-built by the students themselves?
It's not about the history but the basics of computing. The boards can have multicore superscalar high-performance RISC-V CPUs, for all I care. From there you can go and develop a detailed understanding of more advanced devices and systems, if you choose to. I'm not against computers in school. They can be convenient and practical tools. Heck, I want computers in school, just not for just having computers in school.
Demanding every child in 7th grade to buy an iPad for math courses, so they can write on them instead of on paper, will not teach them about computers. They use them only as tools for the convenience (actually, they aren't more convenient; paper is extremely convenient for math), and the school has the possibility to say 'hey look, we are modern and digital!'. That is snake oil. The kids won't learn a thing about the excessively expensive status symbol devices they are forced to buy, especially not with Apple products of all. This is alienating them from what computers are; universal machines.
I don't have in my mind children that 'balk like cavemen at modern computers'. I think of children that can get excited about advanced hardware and systems, and see all the possibilities. They'd ask for the battery run time, for the computing capacity, for the I/O abilities, or the instruction set, etc. And they'd want to code the machine to do things they deem useful. That curiosity is not just not nourished, it is killed how it is done now.
Driving school has different goals. Cars are products that are dangerous when their operator is not trained. So the driving school is there to train people to operate these machines safely. General public school has the goal to prepare children with general knowledge, a basis to build on, so they can be informed citizens. Democracies crucially depend on that.
> Because it creates a dependence on the OS they use in school, and it is not necessary to teach the things I mentioned.
How? Moving a mouse around is the same in KDE, Gnome, Windows and MacOS. A keyboard is the same. The terminals aren't even that different (many Linux and DOS / Powershell commands have equivalents). Almost all modern programming languages are cross platform.
You aren't explaining how it creates this dependence, because I don't see it.
> The teaching can be done abstractly on a board and paper, or with interactive games.
You can't learn how to program or really know what the computer is doing unless you are using and trying to create something on there.
> The practice can be done with microprocessors on educational board with plenty of easily accessible I/O.
This sounds more like electronics class than anything else.
A mouse is not necessary to understand computers nor to interact with them. I don't want schools to prepare the next generation of Web users that can create an account with Google, but barely anything more; that way the democratic oversight of technological changes and powerful companies fails, because the citizens aren't informed and competent.
Humans are strongly bound to habits. I have seen that personally, and in reports about institutions doing the change. Some people were strongly opposed to change away from Windows because the alternative doesn't look and feel the same, so they don't like it. And that even if the alternative offers the same capabilities.
Building a habit around Windows is part of Microsoft strategy to bind people to its platform. That is why academics and schools get discounts. Public infrastructure like schools must not fall for this fixation.
Children learn how a combustion engine works, and how it can be controlled. Why don't they learn how a CPU works, and how to program it?
> You can't learn how to program or really know what the computer is doing unless you are using and trying to create something on there.
This is incorrect. The principles of a computer can be explained and understood with pen and paper. Even the execution of a simplistic computer can be worked out with pen and paper, just as algorithms can be thought and reasoned about that way.
> A mouse is not necessary to understand computers nor to interact with them.
Almost every operating system on the market comes with a WIMP interface that requires some sort of pointer device. So yes they are kinda necessary now.
> don't want schools to prepare the next generation of Web users that can create an account with Google, but barely anything more; that way the democratic oversight of technological changes and powerful companies fails, because the citizens aren't informed and competent.
You are building a strawman here. We were talking about concepts. Concepts can be taught on any modern operating system. What logging into Google has to do with any of this isn't clear.
> Humans are strongly bound to habits. I have seen that personally, and in reports about institutions doing the change. Some people were strongly opposed to change away from Windows because the alternative doesn't look and feel the same, so they don't like it. And that even if the alternative offers the same capabilities.
Sorry this is another mis-representation conflating habits with people not liking people changing something that works for them.
People generally don't like you changing things because change normally brings a new set of problems they don't want to deal with when what they already have works perfectly well. That is what they are really telling you when they say "It doesn't feel the same".
This has nothing to do with teaching computing concepts in schools. The reality is that only a small percentage of those children taught these core concepts will choose to pursue them in higher education.
> Building a habit around Windows is part of Microsoft strategy to bind people to its platform. That is why academics and schools get discounts. Public infrastructure like schools must not fall for this fixation.
Another way of saying this is "Apple and Microsoft make products that work well and people will prefer them if they aren't forced to use something else first".
Again this isn't anything to do with teaching computing concepts which can be done on any modern computer (or even ones from the past).
Well sometimes you don't get to use the tech you want. I almost never get the use the tech I want on a project, It is normally chosen for me by someone else and I have to live with their decisions.
People like to pretend that being required to use to use a Windows machine is akin to water-boarding or some other awful imposition.
I don't want to use Windows. I won't work for anybody that forces me to use Windows. I can choose where to work. Children are forced to go to school, it is obligatory. That's why it is not okay to force children in schools to use Windows.
Computers for children are used for convenience or to solve problems. Neither of which requires Windows, or any other vendor-specific platform.
It's neither justified nor necessary to force children to use Windows or any other specific operating system in school.
