Well, as for education ..
I left school at 16 and went straight to college to do a BTEC course in Computer Studies, and got top marks in both years. I then went to university and made a pigs ear of things which meant that I left early without a degree (although in the end I wound up with a diploma in HE). It hasn't stopped me from getting good jobs as a system administrator in and around Norwich and London and I've done lots of stuff for other companies in my spare time which has earned me a bit of extra dosh.
I continue my "education" by reading books, mucking about with my server, mucking about with work stuff and learning things. I've begun to learn Perl properly since I took this job with Internet Assist and I'm enjoying it. I'll be moving on to PHP and SQL stuff good and proper next, and all the while I'm earning money.
An education is important - whether you're educated by the state, your parents or learning during employment. However, as for spelling and grammatical errors - I'm pretty bad, I think. I have trouble going back and reading what I've written to correct it's syntax or spelling mistakes.
In informal email and web pages, strict use of the English language isn't so important. However, professional employers in the vast majority of the various industries DO expect their employees to have good grasp of English. It would reflect very badly on their company if a letter was sent to their clients with bad spelling and grammatical mistakes. Heck, I've received those kinds of letters and wonders who employed them.
But I do agree that English language and literature in UK education needs a big boost to get it back on track. I can never really remember covering the syntatical layout of the language in any great detail whilst I was at primary or secondary school. They made us read books more than anything, and write essays which even having made mistakes, they were not always clearly pointed out by the teachers.
That's my two pence for this morning. I've got the lovely tasks of moving sites across from one server to another - dead boring. :|
----- Original Message ----- From: "David Freeman" david_freeman@rocketmail.com To: social@lists.alug.org.uk Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2001 10:24 AM Subject: [alug social] Hurrah, A list to troll flame and discuss off topic
OK so I'm not going to troll or flame, but I'm sure somepeople will.
But we need a topic to start discussion on.
I would like to suggest Education, in particular, how crap it is.
Discuss
Thanks
D
=====
"We all know Linux is great... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." Linus Torvalds
Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ The Alug Social mailing list To post: Social@lists.alug.org.uk To change your subscription options, visit:- http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/social