Students of modern education systems today are forced to use the tools the education centers attributed to them. The problem lies within the generality of the programs offered and the inability for students of all genres to choose where such programs will bring them through appropriate choices of tools. Because the available tools to develop projects in high education institutions depend on teacher expertise for evaluation, which is a model based on a hundreds of years old education system, modern technology students keep seeing their talent and choices impeded by these limitations, which ultimately impedes on innovation.
For example, when developing a browser-based game project, several solutions exist today. The most common that comes in mind would be the Adobe Flash Platform, which itself is divided in the Flash Professional authoring tool and the Flex framework. Next up are various solutions, like Microsoft Silverlight or Java Applets and JavaFX, which all offer compelling solutions, some even open source, that can go beyond what is possible on the Flash Platform. Arguably, this all depends on your target market, but for a student aiming to work at a company where Java is the primary language of development, being obligated to program in ActionScript on the Flash Platform impedes on his personal development and his ability to attain his goals, which is in fact counter-educative.
In more extreme cases, you could potentially count tools such as HTML 5 technologies and JavaScript as valuable market options that could prove an extremely good thing to learn for the future of the web. However, the primary source of expertise, graduating students, fails to give track to such nascent technologies and hence slows down technological evolution because the educational institutions they come from refuse to adapt and reform around newer technologies, which is ironic because the same teachers that fail to learn the new technologies often remember the students about how on the market place you have to keep learning new technologies to stay on top. One has to wonder why educational institutions don’t do the same.
Of course, it goes without saying the problem isn’t only restricted to the case of in-browser video games or Internet video streaming technologies. It applies to almost any environment. For example, more design students will be forced to use the Apple Mac platform, while most networking students will be forced to learn Microsoft Windows networking technologies, even if a considerable bulk of the market uses open alternatives like BSD and Linux distributions.
These limitations also have a major impact on the flourishing of open systems like Linux, which end up never getting into educational institutions despite being free and offering the ability for these institutions to lower their cost and in turn lower the amount of taxes paid as well as making education more accessible by lowering tuition fees.
In other words, educational systems should change and become more open to various technologies and guide the students towards choosing the ideal solution for their own career paths. In my opinion at least, this is the way of the Information Age.
