I couldn't agree more...
I'm a 28 year old self employed Infrastructure Architect, I'd like to show you where education gave me a leg up and where it let me down on the way to where I am now.
I started secondary school in 1993 at what was the 13th and last City Technology College ever built, it was brand new and my year group was the first and (to start with) only year group... it gradually opened year by year as we progressed. It took in a cross section of pupils from different backgrounds and eventually became one of the first Academies. It is now the biggest Academy in the Bristol area.
During my first year, we were given touch typing lessons (I've never met anyone else of my generation who was taught to type at school... why?) and basic lessons in Desktop Publishing (using Clarisworks) on Macs, twice a week for 30 minutes (outside of the normal curriculum), at the time we had the largest network of Mac's anywhere in europe. The use of IT was central to every lesson that we had, up to the point where we began GCSE study, at this point the curriculum was more strict and we were only able to use it for certain things. Every student had what we would now consider to be basic skills in DTP, spreadsheets, databases (Filemaker Pro) email and using the internet (via our JANET connection) by the age of 13. At the time this was almost unheard of in the local area.
I took nine GCSE's and a part one GNVQ in Information Technology (by this time we had a suite of Windows NT4.0 PC's as well). The IT subject matter taught in the IT course was woefully inadequate... almost the entire time the class thought it was being taught to suck eggs. Most of us that took it had taken a strong interest in IT (as you might expect given we were surrounded by it) and would help with maintenance of the IT systems and computer rooms around the school, we were expecting to learn things that would be a bit more advanced. The network admin at our school, while not being incredibly strong in IT used us extensively and encouraged us to learn, we would do builds, installs and patches on workstations (Mac & Windows) for her. Some of us also did things with Linux, SunOS and SGI Irix.
Of the group of 48 who took the Part 1 IT GNVQ, 2 actually finished the coursework, not because it was hard, but because it was so useless and boring, we could have proved all of our skills in all of the areas the GNVQ required in the first week by going through work we had produced over the previous 3 years, however, the format of the course insisted that we follow planned exercises in sequence that added up to a lot less than we were capable of. Worst of all... we had to submit all of our completed activities in PRINTED form, not on floppy or CD... printed. You could pass with distinction if you just made it look like it worked, the examiner never got a floppy copy and would never know.
What the course taught was how to use Excel, Word, Powerpoint and how to create a basic database in MS Access 97.
I then went on to A-Level, I'd been told the Advanced GNVQ in IT would be more my thing, since it would teach more advanced IT subject matter. I started it, realised it was going over old ground for at least the first year and that it was going to be equally useless. I quit the course and took an A-Level in computing as an evening class at another College, this again focused on MS Office and Access 2000 (I at least learned some VB this time), but because it wasn't a GNVQ you could be more creative with your coursework and rather than multiple choice questions you could give proper answers for the exams. It was better than the GNVQ but it still covered a lot of old ground and I question the value of most of it.
After VIth form I did a gap year with an organisation called the year in Industry, working in an IT department of an engineering consultancy, where frankly they were amazed that I could type, knew what a CAD package was, could build web pages and knew something of linux. I cant thank everyone at "Scott Wilson" enough for their nurturing attitude while I was with them, without doubt one of the best decisions I ever made was to do my gap year with them.
I then went to university... where what I was taught for the 1st year was effectively the computing A-Level again (I'd used none of it in my gap year), but with some Java (taught very badly), some C (taught slightly less badly), some completely useless maths about matrices and something about logic gates, which I have yet to find any practical use for. However, the university was a Cisco academy and I did learn some useful stuff about IP and routing, which I still use. I dropped out after the first year.
The system fails because:
* Each stage of the education process repeats the last rather than extending it, this means if you start on the track early there is no incentive at the later stages, since you wont learn much new
* All IT courses assume no knowledge and don't allow you to start further along and prove your ability
* IT teachers and university lecturers seem to have very little knowledge of the needs of businesses or the IT industry
* Schools don't have the right equipment or software to teach, they don't adapt with industry and are often left behind the curve
* The system teaches students to use specific products (generally MS Office) this means that when confronted with other packages the students are lost
On the last note, in our case all students knew Clarisworks and the Windows machines were largely neglected until Clarisworks was junked by the school in favour of MSOffice - many found MSOffice confusing, but in the modern world, students learn MS Office and then have trouble with newer versions (e.g office 2007's ribbon interface) or competing packages like OpenOffice.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
