[Edu-sig] Python as Application

[Arthur]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kirby Urner [mailto:urnerk at qwest.net]
> Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 12:07 PM
> To: 'Arthur'; edu-sig at python.org
> Subject: RE: [Edu-sig] Python as Application
> 
> "big issues".
> 
> Scenario:
> 
> Microsoft realizes IronPython has great potential for recruiting future
> knowledge workers to the .NET development platform and launches an
> advertising campaign to that effect, focusing on a few showcase high
> schools
> and colleges that have incorporated IronPython into their curricula,
> thanks
> to generous grants from Microsoft for teacher training at Microsoft
> University.

No. Absolutely not.  Bad. Bad.

Our schools are not "worker training" institutions.  Never have been -
overtly.  They are educational institutions.  Knowledge transfer of the kind
that is appropriate to high school is by its nature more generic and general
than then anything the .Net platform is about. We are in fundamental
disagreement about what is and is not appropriate - and all we are doing is
flushing out the fact that our disagreement is fundamental, rather than
rhetorical.  Except that you got $100 million to play with that "we" don't.
"We" need to look for a way to disarm you - so as to be in a position to
have a competition of ideas on the merits.  And if that means going to find
a way to get to the Feds, or the Teachers Union or the UN to kvetch about
how the game is being played and why the game played in that way is not in
anyone's interest - well I am expecting that is what things will come to in
the next five years or so, unless enough people are successfully lulled into
passivity by the "tsunami" argument - and reconcile themselves that tsunamis
have become good.

 
> Microsoft signs on as a major sponsor for Pycon2008.

Google, I know, sponsored Alex Martelli's appearance at a Linux Users event
this week in New York.

Wonderful for Python, and wonderfully appropriate in any case. 

But I am a schoolmarm, when it comes to schools.  The entire point of my
relentless efforts to reach you is that what is appropriate in Industry and
the Market Place is not what is appropriate in the context of education and
schooling.  

And making great headway in my efforts to be convincing, I sense ;)

Art