By that argument, children shouldn't be writing their documents in Word, nor their presentations in powerpoint, nor using computers that contain proprietary intel micro-code in any classes.
The reality is two-fold:
Proprietary software is used universally, so learning some of it will make you more marketable later on and help you in life. Knowing excel / word is valuable because many companies run on those pieces of software to some large degree.
Secondly, it's pragmatic; there's no real viable option to using proprietary intel or amd hardware while using any computer, so we must use them.
Micro-code, I don't care about. As you say you'd have to ban the use of computers entirely, but having to write your documents in Word etc., I do not think is good.
As a student, you should be able to install the software that you use in class on your PC at home, without having to jump through infinite hoops or asking your parents to buy it for you.
Sure, Microsoft Office, you can sort of expect to need and need again in the future. But with other software, you can hardly guess how often you're going to be using it.
So, you're not going to buy it just to play around with it at home. You might even skip doing homework, if it's too much hassle to install.
A required internet connection can also be particularly inpairing, depending on your situation. I was for example provided an educational version of Matlab in university, but ended up mostly learning in GNU Octave (which was thankfully fantastic), because I traveled to university by train and so did most of my learning in the train, where I had no internet connection.
Another example is me having to pirate an outdated version of Delphi in middle school, because we were writing a program with that in school, that I wanted to continue at home. The teacher did not intend for anyone to continue working at home, so we weren't provided an educational version or similar. The version of Delphi we used was also so old that you actually couldn't buy it anymore.
Lastly, if you can't transfer your LibreOffice knowledge to Microsoft Office, I don't think you should claim any particular computer skills on your CV.
We're not talking about rocket science being done in Excel. You generally only need the most basic of features, which function almost identically even in Gnumeric.
> By that argument, children shouldn't be writing their documents in Word, nor their presentations in powerpoint, nor using computers that contain proprietary intel micro-code in any classes.
Actually, I don't think that's an absurd consequence of the argument: maybe children shouldn't be writing their documents using proprietary software; maybe their computers shouldn't contain proprietary microcode.
In the case of Word, one might make the counter-argument that it is very powerful; another might then make the counter-counter-argument that alternatives to Word in 2018 are more powerful than Word was years ago, and yet somehow we all managed to write well all those years ago. I'm a bit weird, so I think children should be taught to write longhand, and then typeset their papers with LaTeX.
In the case of proprietary microcode, I think it's pretty obvious that the world would be better if we could all trust our CPUs.
The reality is two-fold:
Proprietary software is used universally, so learning some of it will make you more marketable later on and help you in life. Knowing excel / word is valuable because many companies run on those pieces of software to some large degree.
Secondly, it's pragmatic; there's no real viable option to using proprietary intel or amd hardware while using any computer, so we must use them.