I agree to an extent. However the problem with this approach is that the majority of school children who leave school will not be programmers however much they are taught programing in ICT. When they come to a working age their potential employer will not need the skills of a programmer they will need the general skills of somebody having used a word-processor or a spreadsheet just in the same way as they would have a good level of reading, writing and hopefully critical thinking.

It’s not just in ICT that children are taught to do rather than think. My son is considered bright but I see that he doesn’t like to think things out for himself until really pushed. School should allow children to explore as many possibilities as possible but, as you state above, in ICT they are taught basics (no pun intended) but not allowed to discover the workings behind the screen. Teaching is restricted to enable students to pass exams rather than encourage individual pursuits.

IT is not alone. ‘Food Technology’, a part of ‘Design and Technology’ is now about how food is produced industrially, following a similar BECTA rationale to that cited. ‘Doing’ is definitely out here too with the result that kids leave school with no grasp of actual cooking… See any connection with current ‘obesity’ scares? Ditto the MS-centric rubbish served up now for ‘ICT’. As an ex school network manager I was saddened to see this. No attempt is made to see beyond the package, not even to raise awareness of OSS or other such alternatives let alone actually use them! Part of this is accommodate teachers (and teacher trainers) of limited skills, allowing IT-ignorant staff to bone up and spout the texts back at the (now bored) kids.
That said, the plus side of this for me was that there were now so few savvy smart-arses to go diving into my system!

I am fascinated by all of your comments. There is always a balance between the understanding of ‘methods’ and the attainment of ‘results’, but perhaps we have moved too far towards a restrictive view of what counts as results. My worry is that we are producing ‘box tickers’ en masse, and closing down innovative thinking.

I agree that today’s students (I teach 16-18 year-olds) often prefer to wait until their teacher tells them how to do something, rather than putting in the effort to work it out themselves.
I recently heard someone speaking about the “One Laptop Per Child” project. The software allows children to view the (open source) code, and the evidence suggests that they learn both English, advanced computer use and computer programming skills without any formal teaching.
Perhaps it is the expectation of being told how to do everything that is holding our students back?

Mention of BASIC reminds me what Edsger Dijkstra said in “How do we tell the truths that might hurt?”: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

But of course what did he know? [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra[/url]

Never mind what is taught in schools the impression I got when I last visited my old University was that not many students were interested in learning how to program. I suppose that programming is considered too difficult.

Many of the young programmers, and some of the older ones too, at my last company seemed to have little understanding of the fundamentals of computing.

Nick