[pjmlp]

Yes, in Portuguese high schools you can do a technical education during the last three years (10 - 12), that gets you ready for the job market.

I did mine with focus on informatics during in the late 80's/early 90's.

Brief overview of three years subjects, besides the usual high school stuff.

Graphics programming, compilers, databases, MS-DOS, UNIX (Xenix back then), Networking (Novell Netware), OS development.

Languages that we got to use for different kinds of assignments during those three years, GW-Basic, Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal 5.5, Turbo C 2.0/K&R C, Turbo C++ 1.0, Dbase III+, Clipper Summer '87 and OOP variant Clipper 5.x, 8086 and 68000 Assembly.

The high school I took it on still offers this, naturally updated to more modern stacks and teaching subjects.

[slavik81]

For comparison, my Canadian high school offered a "Teach Yourself C++ in 30 Days" book that you could study for up to 10 hours in the optional Computers course. If you chose that module, by the end of the first class, you would be more knowledgeable on the subject than any teacher in the school.

(It was actually an excellent school; they just did not care about computing. Nevertheless, I'm quite jealous of those kids with such an interesting option available to them.)

[a-priori]

Also when I was in high school in Canada in about 2001-2003, I ended up taking over the class and teaching C++ because I’d already learned enough of it in my spare time that knew it better than the teacher (he liked Pascal better).

[pjmlp]

Yes, unfortunately education varies a lot across the globe.

This is why we have Raspberry PIs now, even though such boards have existed for years.

It all started as an effort to reboot UK high school computing education that was stuck into teaching Office.