Nobody wants to teach it, except those who shouldn't be allowed to.
At my daughter's school - a Technology College, no less - they've come up with what they term a "novel and effective" solution to the lack of teachers capable of teaching the subject: online courses. They just stick 20 kids in a room with a bunch of computers, the teacher (usually a music or French teacher) writes a URL on the board and then they get on with it. I was actually considering going in to teaching (maths and IT) a couple of years ago, and the route I was planning on required that I spend at least 2 days in a school, so I sat in on a few lessons of each. I was horrified at how out-of-date and inadequate (and sometimes plain *wrong*) the courses were. Most of the material came from a basic maintenance course that I'd come across back in 1998, and it was just as wrong then as it is now. I spoke to the head about it, and his response was "It doesn't really matter, as long as we're teaching them something about IT."
A short while later (during one of the few lessons where the kids were actually being taught), I caught them advising kids to use a commercial logo generator site (which requires that you pay to download the images), take a screenshot and edit out the watermark. This was in the same lesson where they were telling them to fake their date of birth to get a hosting account. None of the staff could see a problem with these things until I threatened to take it to the school governors and the press.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
