[geeks] Q: Regarding Linux in K-12 education

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 07:41:29AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> In this kid's case he choose to go study theater and agreed to borrow/ 
> pay back $160,000 for the privlige. There is no way this kid ever sat  
> down and thought through the ramifications of borrowing $40,000/yr for  
> four years before going off to college. If he did think it through and  
> still decided it made *financial* sense, then the K-12 school system  
> failed him.
>
> Note the emphasis on the word 'financial'...

Well, it boils down to money after all, doesn't it. IMHO the question is
who pays for his education and why? 

The pre-Sputnik attitude was that if you wanted a college education you
paid for it yourself. There was (I think) some loans and some payback 
plans for teachers and doctors, but not a lot of it.

After Sputnik the "free world" realized that the Soviet Union was far ahead
of it in education and had to catch up. That was when there was a big
expansion in the public higher education systems, most notably in the
US.

Remember that in 1960, the thinking was not to put a man on the moon
to 'boldly go where no man has gone before", but to get there before
the Soviets did and prevent them from building a missle base.

In that context the expanded higher education system of the 1960's 
is no longer relevant, neither may be it's funding model. 

A more appropriate model may be the one of Tektronics, who ended up
with a factory full of engineers and no place to send them for further
education. They started a private gradute school of engineering which has 
now become the generalized OGI (Oregon Graduate Institute).

UC Berkeley, which was one of the shools behind "sillicon valley's"
growth is publicly funded but with the state of California's (or the
state of the State of California's) financial problems, it may not be
for long.

Stanford is the other half, AFAIK it get's a lot of money from the US 
government in the form of research contracts and grants. 

Due to propsition 13, (limit on property taxes to sitting owners), the
educational system in California has for many years now been unable to
provide the students with the level of mathematics and hard science
they needed for the education needed to fuel the technology growth.

Perhaps, a special technology tax (or tax re-alignment) is needed to
fund these schools. 

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation. 
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.