I tend to agree with you that there are problems with teaching kids how to use proprietary software like Microsoft Office, but this is a bit different.
It's not like Minecraft is a business tool that you're teaching to school kids, who will then go on to use it when they graduate. It's an educational tool.
This would be like complaining that Carl Sagan's Cosmos or Bill Nye the Science Guy are copyrighted videos.
> This would be like complaining that Carl Sagan's Cosmos or Bill Nye the Science Guy are copyrighted videos.
No. That would be like complaining that we don't have a license to inspect the details of and fix errors in those videos. Free software is usually not in the public domain. To be honest, it would be nice to have that option with videos (or text books!) that you get. I've worked as a teacher before -- I would definitely have exercised that option if it were available (Especially as I was teaching English as a foreign language -- I would have loved to do voice overs for some of the material I had to present). As another aside, you have no idea how much I would have loved to use assets from textbooks that we were forced to buy rather than write/draw my own from scratch -- Over 5 years, I practically had to write my own text book.
But both the point you are making and the one you are trying to refute are quite valid. By putting software in the school system, you are effectively training people to use that software. Sure, it's not software that people have to use, but it's still software that people will choose to use.
On the one hand, it's great to use Minecraft in school, because a lot of kids already play Minecraft. In this case, that's really the point. If you put in a free software project that is similar to Minecraft, it probably won't be as engaging to students.
Free software, on the other hand, opens up opportunities that you won't have with non-free alternatives. It allows people to use the software for any purpose as opposed the the purposes allowed in most educational licenses. It allows people to study and learn from the source code. It allows people to modify the code and to help their friends by sharing their modifications.
In short, both for motivated teachers and students, free software licenses are dramatically better than most academic licenses for software. I agree that you might still choose something else, but ignoring the value that a better license gives you is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Maybe I exaggerated a little bit, Minecraft is a good/decent idea, but it would be much better if it was free software.
I imagine the disappointment in the face of the bright kid of the class when he asks the teacher to see how the game actually works. Still, it's better than no game at all, I guess.
The modding community definitely has a very good idea of how the game actually works, and there is a fair amount of documentation to that effect. The Forge sources are also pretty enlightening.
Thats an interesting ideological argument, whose practical effects would be negative. Vast majority of the high quality education software out there isn't open source.
It also has a really good modding API in Lua, which you could probably get middle school students to have fun with and actually create something in a video game.
By that argument, children shouldn't be writing their documents in Word, nor their presentations in powerpoint, nor using computers that contain proprietary intel micro-code in any classes.
The reality is two-fold:
Proprietary software is used universally, so learning some of it will make you more marketable later on and help you in life. Knowing excel / word is valuable because many companies run on those pieces of software to some large degree.
Secondly, it's pragmatic; there's no real viable option to using proprietary intel or amd hardware while using any computer, so we must use them.
Micro-code, I don't care about. As you say you'd have to ban the use of computers entirely, but having to write your documents in Word etc., I do not think is good.
As a student, you should be able to install the software that you use in class on your PC at home, without having to jump through infinite hoops or asking your parents to buy it for you.
Sure, Microsoft Office, you can sort of expect to need and need again in the future. But with other software, you can hardly guess how often you're going to be using it.
So, you're not going to buy it just to play around with it at home. You might even skip doing homework, if it's too much hassle to install.
A required internet connection can also be particularly inpairing, depending on your situation. I was for example provided an educational version of Matlab in university, but ended up mostly learning in GNU Octave (which was thankfully fantastic), because I traveled to university by train and so did most of my learning in the train, where I had no internet connection.
Another example is me having to pirate an outdated version of Delphi in middle school, because we were writing a program with that in school, that I wanted to continue at home. The teacher did not intend for anyone to continue working at home, so we weren't provided an educational version or similar. The version of Delphi we used was also so old that you actually couldn't buy it anymore.
Lastly, if you can't transfer your LibreOffice knowledge to Microsoft Office, I don't think you should claim any particular computer skills on your CV.
We're not talking about rocket science being done in Excel. You generally only need the most basic of features, which function almost identically even in Gnumeric.
> By that argument, children shouldn't be writing their documents in Word, nor their presentations in powerpoint, nor using computers that contain proprietary intel micro-code in any classes.
Actually, I don't think that's an absurd consequence of the argument: maybe children shouldn't be writing their documents using proprietary software; maybe their computers shouldn't contain proprietary microcode.
In the case of Word, one might make the counter-argument that it is very powerful; another might then make the counter-counter-argument that alternatives to Word in 2018 are more powerful than Word was years ago, and yet somehow we all managed to write well all those years ago. I'm a bit weird, so I think children should be taught to write longhand, and then typeset their papers with LaTeX.
In the case of proprietary microcode, I think it's pretty obvious that the world would be better if we could all trust our CPUs.
