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Comment by pgeorgi | Hacker News Reader

What prevents them is the inability to teach students beyond "click the button that looks _precisely_ like this to get the desired effect".

That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications.

Never mind that nobody ever made a fuss about our driver's license system where you typically learn on a single car model, with the expectation that even the biggest idiot can cope with different placements of the lighting controls or a different number of gears on their manual transmission.

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Which is strange, because Microsoft hasn't kept the same icons all along, and will change things again.

I first learned AtariWriter as a kid. Then at school something on the Apple II. In high school they were all proud to be teaching us WordPerfect 5 for DOS - the same as industry was using. By college everybody had switch to Microsoft word. Microsoft then did a major change to create the ribbon UI. I expect this trend to continue.

This is really how general computing should be taught. Go deep on a few things, but make sure to expose students to a wide enough variety of different paradigms a d systems that they can glean some of the commonalities. From there, they should be able to figure out most of the rest.

It works pretty well in programming languages as well. So long as you don't go too far afield. Lisp fefeated me until I wrote a toy one and I'm still pretty stuck on Haskell, but I've had far fewer issues with some of the more traditional languages.

Sadly it’s far from this. My mom is terrible with any technology and took a computer course which taught stuff like Word. The entire instruction was basically follow fixed checklists of menus to do stuff followed by some test which is entirely about the checklist not about what you did.

She basically forgot it all within a year and is still scared to do anything complicated.

That sounds like a much better approach. Education is such a difficult thing to get right.

Of course that trend continues, but it's their typical excuse ("we need to teach marketable skills") and once the kids are part of the workforce, any further training (e.g. to learn about that mythical Ribbon UI, I remember the concern of how the economy will tank due to that retraining effort in the news back then) is Somebody Else's Problem.

Given that attitude in schools and the constant UI changes even within the MS ecosystem, I guess it should be okay to use LibreOffice for the earlier years and only use Microsoft "and that's what you might use at work" Office after year 8 ;-)

Regarding driving license, at least where I live, if you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can't (legally) drive a car with manual transmission. I get your point though.

Correction: it may have changed since I heard about this when I got my driving license, but you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can drive a car with manual transmission 6 months (soon to be reduced to 3 months) later with an additional training, which look like is 7 hours long.

With the students I've worked (interns) with they had all "MS Office" at school but don't know the basics so I have to explain e.g. how format a document correctly and not use e.g. 'bold' to all of them when they start.

> That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications.

This explains the transition of MS Office to its stupid ribbon interface. We used to have standard menus on all applications. In fact, these menus and how to use them were even taught in school!

I think this generally speaks to modern computer illiteracy: Kids today know almost nothing about how a PC functions basically. Using a computer effectively today is as essential as knowing how to do basic arithmetic, if not more so. There's no reason kids can't be PC experts by grade 6 or 7 or so.

I don't believe that is how schools are supposed to approach teaching. I'm actually fairly sure they don't, outside of exceptional cases.

They certainly have no business making educational policy in contradiction to pedagogy.

If German schools function basically like Finnish ones, then they use MS products because it's what the municipality bought, and schools are a municipal service.

>That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications.

What evidence do you have for this? Based on my experiences with k-12 tech education in the US, this sounds like complete BS.

Good for you. The article is about schools in Germany, Hessen specifically, which is where for several decades I have more to do with schools than I'd like to.

What happened to all the instructors of my day that professed MS Access was the database manager of the future?

Retired. As soon as the kids are in the work force, they're not the teacher's problem anymore.

I know many businesses that still use it extensively. Even for modern applications that call web-APIs to check for addresses or analyzing business cards to extract text info. Really no fan of basics dim-witted syntax and properties, but I am regularly surprised what some people manage to put in one giant file of basic.

Most use Access as a frontend with a normal DBMS, mostly MSSQL-Server of course.

I think a general purpose DB frontend with scripting abilities would be really needed as a replacement. You could just use a browser, but that somehow doesn't fit the target group for these kind of applications.

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