Re: RE: [PLUG] Community Service Project (Devil's

[kmhryhpdblyx@spammotel.com]

I fail to see in my quote where I said the children were stupid.

The reality is that most low-income children that attend public schools in 
low-income neighborhoods score lower in standardized tests than their 
counterparts in more affluent neighborhoods.  That makes it very likely 
that you'll be dealing with 5th or 6th graders who either can't read at 
all, or read at the 2nd or 3rd grade level.  You can either plan for the 
most-likely situation and design the solution appropriately, or you can 
the corner.

This doesn't mean that Linux is the wrong solution.  I agree with the other 
poster who stated that the OS shouldn't matter from the child's 
perspective.  They can learn which icons to click to fire up the web 
browser, etc  We need to design the desktop so that it's that simple.  This 
was also my point about maintaining the systems.  The systems should be 
setup to be as self-maintaining as possible.


At 09:14 AM 7/11/2003 -0700, you wrote:

> > Jim Foster wrote:
> >
> > advocate)
> >
> > I can't believe you guys are debating giving C or Perl to low-income
> > elementary school students.  These are kids who are probably not even
> > reading at their proper grade level.  I bet that a good bunch
> > of these kids
> > won't even be able to read the man pages for some of these
> > packages, let
> > alone put them to use.
> >
> Not that there's no correlation between low-income neighborhoods and 
> quality of education, but these people are impoverished, not stupid. 
> Assuming that they're stupid and withholding opportunities for them to 
> challenge their own minds is certainly not going to help them in the long run.
>
> How many current Engineers were kids hacking around on their computer 20 
> or 30 years ago. How did they learn, considering there was no computer 
> science curriculum in high schools then? They sought knowledge on their 
> own because of their natural curiosity.
>
> Maybe you can't teach every man to fish, but if you got an extra pole, he 
> might be alright. . .
>
> Just my $.02

--
Jim Foster - jif "at" computer .org      http://www.voicenet.com/~jfoster
"Being on a Beemer and not having a wave returned by a         ICQ 
679709
Sportster is like having a clipper ship's hailing not    RAM 2500 Cummins
returned by an orphaned New Jersey solid waste barge." -OTL   '03 GL1800A

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