>The real tragedy was this was followed by the utterly useless national "ICT" curriculum in schools which was essentially all about teaching kids how to use Microsoft Office, and probably discouraged an entire generation of kids from getting involved in software. This still makes me angry.
My own experience of the ICT curriculum in 2011/2012 was very similar. Pre-GCSE had some stuff about building websites with Dreamweaver. The teacher showed us a banking website, and pointed out various UI elements, and our task was to make a website of our own. Unfortunately, we had to do it completely backwards. As part of some "integrated skills" approach, we had to make the website's text buttons, of size exactly 400x200 using Photoshop, and then place them onto the page. I decided that it was silly to do that, so I made the buttons with HTML and CSS. At that point, I was told I should have used Photoshop to make the buttons. I used Photoshop to make reasonably sized buttons to place on the page, and I was again told to make 400x200 buttons. I think after a while I just gave up. This was at a private school, too - which at least ostensibly placed some emphasis on nurturing "gifted and talented" students. I don't know if HTML and CSS counted for that, but I didn't feel nurtured at all.
The GCSE portion of the ICT curriculum was based around creating a database, documentation and pre-made queries with MS Access. Some fancy VBscript dialogue boxes and LIKE queries seemed to get me good marks with it. It was still a far cry from what I wanted to do.
At A-level, same story. We were instructed to make a site with Joomla according to the "client specification" one one hand, and do an exam on things like the meaning of SaaS on the other hand. The documentation process for the Joomla site was utterly inane, needing to include a screenshot of every way you modified it from the basic version of the site to include the "features" (features in this case was selecting and customizing Joomla addons through the web interface). I decided to write some code for a passworded portal, and play around with the HTML/CSS, which apparently didn't impress the examiners much.
It turns out that the only thing I could do at sixth form (for readers outside of Britain this means the stage of education for 16 to 18s) that required some programming was a BTEC, and BTECs don't curry favour with the university admissions process.
It's a miracle I wasn't turned away from computers after all that. In my first year of studying EE, I talked to some computer science students, many of whom told me that they hadn't done any programming before. Ironically, the only reason why I didn't get to do computer science was because I got a B instead of an A in my "ICT" A-level - the Joomla web customization part (the exam was fine). From what I can gather, the university admissions process implicitly works like this:
- Can you program and demonstrate open source work? We don't care. What are your grades like?
- Oh, you didn't include the requisite number of screenshots showing which buttons you clicked to customize a CMS-built website? Sorry, you're just not fit to do computer science. That's all about information technology, didn't you know?
A younger relative did the "computer science" course at school, which is designed to replace or run alongside "ICT". Although better, the questions they asked were inane, and the written exam requires them to write syntactically correct Python code in a big box the size of a page, followed by some questions as to what a BSOD indicates and what "RAM" stands for.
In my experience, non-ICT classes do just fine in teaching people how to use MS Office. You have to write essays for English, and make presentations for History. The fact that there's a class dedicated just for learning how to use MS Office and Adobe products is horrible. The whole school system seems bent on inefficiency and inertia. I've learned more Japanese vocab with Anki (spaced repetition flashcard software) and grammar with a textbook self-studying in the space of a month, for less than an hour a day, than I learned French vocab and grammar for two years in school with weekly vocab tests and three timetabled hours during school time a week. Why don't schools make Anki decks for their students to practice every day, and ask for the Anki stats report each week? Why are history lessons built around remembering which year King John died? Why don't maths classes include any work with computers?