You bring up a key point about inertia and friction in making changes. In my US high school, I was taught typing on a manual typewriter, advanced typing on a powered typewriter, and word processing on a TRS-80 model III. I taught myself programming with AtariBasic on an Atari 800. Typing has been an important skill in my career considering it was a throw away class. Programming logic is still useful even though the languages have changed. That was of course nearly 30 years ago. The key is if what is being taught now will be relevant in 30 years?
The tools used by the teachers is irrelevant. What is important is providing a chance to work with hardware they can break, write simple programs, and troubleshoot problems. Open hardware and software are the best tools for that task, and the skills learned will be relevant decades into the future.
Side note: If you are changing an organization from proprietary to open architecture, you don't start with the desktop, but concentrate on upgrading the infrastructure. Once you have the back office system agnostic, you have significantly more flexibility in implementing end user hardware.
I find the concept of teaching technology literacy to be silly at best. If you need to write a paper, expect students to use a word processor (when I was in school my papers were expected to be typed, on a typewriter, no dot-matrix printing). Same with presentations and spreadsheets. Even better, turn the paper in online. Maybe the issue is the teachers don't understand technology well enough to use the tools to make education more efficient?
Computer programming and engineering are excellent stretch subjects for talented students, but general use of technology to do day to day work should be rolled into normal curriculum.
You bring up a key point about inertia and friction in making changes. In my US high school, I was taught typing on a manual typewriter, advanced typing on a powered typewriter, and word processing on a TRS-80 model III. I taught myself programming with AtariBasic on an Atari 800. Typing has been an important skill in my career considering it was a throw away class. Programming logic is still useful even though the languages have changed. That was of course nearly 30 years ago. The key is if what is being taught now will be relevant in 30 years?
The tools used by the teachers is irrelevant. What is important is providing a chance to work with hardware they can break, write simple programs, and troubleshoot problems. Open hardware and software are the best tools for that task, and the skills learned will be relevant decades into the future.
Side note: If you are changing an organization from proprietary to open architecture, you don't start with the desktop, but concentrate on upgrading the infrastructure. Once you have the back office system agnostic, you have significantly more flexibility in implementing end user hardware.