ICT in schools

In a comment on a fine Cognitive Edge post:

I'm livid with the way that our education system has reduced Computation, one of the intellectual adventures of our age, into training for office workers.

Comments

[ditdotdat]

Not to mention the disgraceful profiteering of the conractors who capitalise on the ingnorance of most school heads in order to supply them with shit solutions at monster prices.

[Piers]

I kind of agree. The curriculum means that most of the IT in schools (certainly at primary level) is focused on things like Word, Powerpoint etc. I've introduced MIT's Scratch to the school I work at, which gets children playing around with loops, variables, logic etc to develop their own software and the response has been pretty good. That's only feasible via via the IT club though (rather than classes). As a result, computation as such is still, sadly, just an option.