You probably didn't blink when MS Office was made mandatory at a high school near you. That's obvious, all the tools you need in the world of business. Obviously, that's all you need ...
I used to teach National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 1, 2 and a bit more, in IT, in the UK, back in the mid 1990s. The ones I worked with were RSA based which means that they were basically typewriter type exercises that were slightly sexed up to deal with word processors etc.
We had 12 modules to cover. Each student needed three pieces of "evidence" per module. So a module might be word processing or spreadsheet or database. We also had to cover fax (office equipment) and email (as was).
A folder of evidence would end up with roughly 50 sheets of paper, a few letters and prose, some spreadsheets and simple database reports. A few emails and so on.
You were allowed three mistakes. Yes three, across a lot of docs/body of evidence. An example of a mistake is a speling mistake. Another mistake would be not exactly two spaces after a full stop (period). It was awful and generally ended up with quite a lot of the trainers "truing up evidence".
On the other hand, I have an eye for noticing mistakes that is close to legendary.
Soz, waffled on a bit.
If your child was taught rudimentary Blender in school, I hope you'd be pleased.
We had a mandatory "informatics" class in all years (age 6 to 18).
At start we learned how to use computers and programming in logo.
Age 10 was HTML.
Then there was a year for OpenOffice, a year for 3D graphics in Blender (I think when we were like 14). We had some lessons on vector graphics in Inkscape. Some lessons on audio editing in Audacity.
We learned some Unix basics. Later we returned to HTML and learned CSS.
Age 13 we learned C, the more motivated ones continued with Allegro and later C++.
Age 15 PHP and SQL
There was also a semester on finite state machines, but that was much less popular among students.
I graduated in 2010 and I am very happy regarding the curiculum my teachers built (out of their own volition and motivation).
Nowadays I think they also do Python and focus more on generic internet researching / verifying information.
Wow, where's this school with such program? Back in my day, we had BASIC programming on TI calculators. Younger (french) children i meet don't even have programming lessons, they're just taught how to use Microsoft Office and laposte.net webmail... just enough tech proficiency to be efficient wage-slaves, but no political/technical reflections.
I went to an experimental public school in Slovakia. We were allowed to diverge somewhat from rules ministry of education prescribes for the ordinary schools. So the teachers had more freedom in doing whatever they wanted. Usually it worked well, but sometimes it didn't.
Oh experimental schools are so cool usually. Too bad after a few years the ministry usually comes in and tears down everything because the experiments were so successful [0].
If you ever write about your experiences there and what worked and what didn't, i'd be very interested in a link to the post! :)
[0] For example in France, the public ministry of Education has been running test programs with "Montessori" education techniques for several decades (the techniques are >100y old). All of these experiments have been strong successes, and that's precisely why they were never implemented globally. The government doesn't want people to get too smart.. they'd rather have docile wage-slaves who bow before the flag.
Is that an argument for making 3D graphics mandatory or the opposite?
I am suspicious of arguments of the form: “Here’s some stupid shit people do! Let’s do more.” Although I will grant there is a seductive consistency to the logic.
It’s not an argument for or against anything other than saying it’s no more or less absurd than having compulsory classes in badminton or years of a single foreign language
There are of course more generic ways to use the time to teach in that area — teach person so finance instead of quadratic equations, teach a wide selection of introduction to language and importantly culture from a variety of places around the world instead of a single foreign language for years on end, teach personal health instead of whatever PE is, teach more generic computer concepts (what a file is, what a network is, some form of programming) rather than specific tools (be it blender or powerpoint)
