If they want to be consumers, you're correct. If they want to be producers, you are entirely wrong. If they are content to wait for someone to write solutions for them, you are correct. If they want to solve their own problems, you are entirely wrong.
You’re in the old pre-appliance thinking, we’re in the appliance age of computing.
I know how all of my appliances work, and can fix those which are fixable. Windows users can not (generally) say the same about their systems.
The computer is just a tool people put data into and get data out of, the average person doesn’t need to know how they work anymore than the average person knows how microwaves, florescent lights or the internal combustion engine work.
First off, you're wrong. When I was in Home Ec, we learned how all of the appliances worked and how to do minor repairs. How can you know if your stove is working optimally if you don't know how it works at all? I know how internal combustion, microwaves, and florescent lights work from physics class. They teach all of that in high school. Or they used to.
Secondly, it takes more than "average" people with average educations to be the engineers and scientists of the world. It takes innovative, better-than-average minds.
I am not satisfied with average. Why are you? More to the point, why should we be satisfied with average results from America's students? Many are capable of much more than average.
I started teaching command line Linux to the six year old this year. You'd be surprised how easily they pick things up at this age. Of course, we strive for excellence, not "make do" and not "average".
Not teaching OSes that the students will almost certainly not encounter in adulthood isn’t preventing critical thinkers. If they want to go learn other OSes they can, nobody is stopping them, and you don’t need to know ANY OS at all to be a critical thinker. It’s just an OS, not a religion, in spite of what some Nix-weenies and Mac-heads want you to think.
Well, you've got me there. If we teach the minimum and demand very little, most American students will almost certainly never encounter various OSes in adulthood. The menial jobs they will land will not require much that way. So you're right. If we raise another generation of people who don't know how things work, they will have no need for anything difficult.
And again I refer you to the second sentence in the post you originally replied to but demonstrably did not bother to read: “Sure if you get into the business you MIGHT wind up in front of a different OS, but only a small percentage of the kids will wind up in the business, and thanks to Windows’ dominance most of the jobs in the business are on Windows, if they go to a non-Windows shop they can learn it there...” You CAN be a producer and not learn Nix. I AM a producer, been a producer for nearly 20 years, and I never touch Nix. Because Windows dominates the desktop space it also dominates the application space and therefore dominates the job space. I could jump to a Nix shop if I had to, because I’ve been around long enough to be able to ramp up to any OS in a couple of months (once you’ve used half a dozen they all are pretty much the same), but I don’t need to, and most folks don’t.
Do you know “how” your appliances work or do you understand what’s going on? There’s a massive difference. And actually only being able to fix those that are “fixable” shows you only know “how” they work. If you can’t actually build a microwave cannon from parts you don’t really know how your microwave works (same here), so you are just using it like an appliance, just like a Windows user.
Minor repairs != knowing how it works. Build from parts == knowing how it works. When you’re talking about knowing what’s going on under the covers that’s what you’re talking about. Most of that stuff on your list they NEVER taught in the main section of high school. The closest you’ve got is auto shop, which is an elective.
High school is for teaching average people. Above average people figure crap out on their own. Best programmer I know never took any classes in high school or even college, books, lots of books.
Anybody that’s not satisfied with average doesn’t understand math, average is average for a reason, a reason that cannot be fought. Those capable of more than average will, because they’re already above average. They’ll learn from books, they’ll qualify for accelerated schools, they’ll join hobby clubs. The generation that’s primarily responsible for cranking out the software that runs the world today didn’t learn ANY computer stuff in high school because it wasn’t there in most schools, and even when computers were there they got out of high school before there was Windows or Linux so clearly people can learn this stuff outside of high school.
OSes aren’t that hard, even on the command line the modern age is easy. Try those funky Commodore 64 commands, that’s a learning curve.
It’s not teaching the minimum, it’s teaching the useful for the most of them. 99% of the kids in high school today will never sit down in front of a Linux box in their lives. Why teach them something that will never be of any use to them ever? Should we teach all high school kids how to run a thresher? Of course not, because most of them won’t, and the ones that will can learn it elsewhere. Who said anything about menial jobs? I specifically mentioned desk jobs, you know, where people work with Windows computers. Most people don’t know how most things work, that doesn’t stop them from using them, and it doesn’t stop us from getting plenty of people who know how they work well enough to produce the next generation of those items. We still make tons of cars in this country in spite of the fact that the vast majority of American have no freaking clue what actually happens when the turn the key.