I don't think it's a bad idea. Generally, I'd say skills learnt using Linux would be fairly transferable to other computer based tasks, regardless of OS.

The article however; utter shite. It's bad journalism.

'do nothing but line the pockets of the publishers', well yes. The company does profit from this, so? That's not valid argument to not use it in a schools? It should be approached from a 'look what we can learn from free tools' angle.