There was previously a thread knocking around about the teaching of IT in schools. I had my faith partially required yesterday when I met our next work experience lad.
Bless the little ginger geek, he looked terrified coming in to our place worth my ugly crew staring at him. I had forgotten how Young 15 year old kids look.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised when he whipped out a USB stick & asked if I wanted to asses code samples. Really really basic stuff of course, but we had well structured html, CSS (the neat commenting of which put my deva to shame) and he had been tinkering with Javascript.
Considering that he is the first sub 18 old we've met who had even used 'view source' I'm fairly happy with that. His school had been following some IBM sponsored program, which seems to be streets ahead of what we've seen in the past.
Bodes well. We've got a meeting next week about sponsoring 18-24 yr old apprentices on a longer term basis. Fingers crossed... Although I can't help but think there should be laws to stop us corrupting youngsters.