Mac Vs. PC Fight Gets Nasty At School
from the get-over-it dept
A school board in North Carolina is facing the wrath of a bunch of Mac fanatics for chosing to replace their Macs with new Dell machines. This is crazy. I understand that people like Macs, and that’s fine. But, to flip out because your local school district is bringing in PCs is ridiculous. I know many Mac fans accuse me of being biased against them, but this just shows the ridiculous level they go to. The school board chose to go with Dell for a reason (price and standardization) and that makes sense. Mac fans always have to turn this into some sort of holy war. Hell, I wouldn’t care if the board chose to go with all Macs. I just think that organizing a group and protesting what computers the school buys is a waste of time and makes the Mac fans look just a little overzealous.
Comments on “Mac Vs. PC Fight Gets Nasty At School”
Standardisation?????
ON PCs? Standards? Don; make me laugh
Good for them
Good for them! They should stand up for what they want to use, not allow a bunch of beaurocrats impose inferior tools on them mumbling meaningless phrases such as “industry standard” (which previous poster pointed out is a joke). We had the problem here in the UK where all the teachers wanted Acorn computers in their class room but the educational authorities wanted “industry standard PCs” despite the fact they were so poor for the job at hand. In the end the education authorities won and our education suffered.
Phillip.
Re: Good for them
Um… I think you guys are missing the context of “standardization” here. The point was that the school currently has a mix of Macs and PCs and it’s harder to maintain. If all of the computeres are Dells, it’s a hell of a lot easier to maintain. There’s no talk of “industry standard” here. Just “standardization”…
Standardization Should Be for Big Corporations, No
While I agree that some Mac folks can go overboard with these issues, what concerns me is that it sounds like this school is being run by a bunch of corporate executives, not educators.
Isn’t the point of an education to give one exposure to as much information and experience as possible? Heck, if it were up to me, I’d put Mac, PCs and even UNIX boxes in a school, and expose students to all of them.
Although the kids will probably end up in a job where they’ll have to use a Windows machine, some may end up doing graphic design on a Mac, or setting up a MySQL database on a Linux box. In which case this school will have failed the students. But they can proudly state that their school standardized on Dell. I’m sure that will get them the job.
Re: Standardization Should Be for Big Corporations
I have to agree, since when has exposing kids to only 1 computer platform been good for education? Maybe schools should finally standardize on English, and stop offering all those stupid second language classes. Heck, why not standardize on sciences, and stop offering to teach art, social studies and gym class too.
msykes