[gambomb]

I think you may be overestimating the capacity of the education system to change. I'm now a year removed from High School, but in my class of 350 there were maybe 10 who could program proficiently. Only two (myself and a friend) knew what linux was. I would say it wasn't treated as "cool", but certainly regarded with a wierd respect.

[digitalsushi]

I don't accept that anyone can know how familiar everyone else is of a thing. It's possible that you're perfectly correct, but how you arrived at this was assumption.

What if, out of the 348/350 other students you claim were unaware of linux, there were more than 0 of them that were happy to play with linux on their own without broadcasting it to you?

My point in this is that hobbies may seem unique, and it's great that we can motivate the growth of our identity in this, but to take it to the extent that you and your friend were the only kids that knew linux is blissful ignorance. No offense to you, it's just your assumption that I feel compelled to respond to.

[gambomb]

Yes there are some assumptions that play into my assertion. Were there others who may have toyed with linux on their own time, quietly? Quite possibly. However, I doubt it. When Lockheed Martin visited my school to mentor/start a cyber security (hacking) competition team, we were only able to get ~18 people (from multiple grades) to show up. I also know for a fact that there were only ever about 60 kids (across multiple grades) enrolled in the school's CS offerings during the year. I knew all of these kids.

I think you'll find that 300 is a much smaller number of people than it sounds. While I respect your challenge of my assertion, I feel it's mostly valid. The effect intended is that only a very small fraction of kids in my class were technically inclined.

[mseebach]

I'm not talking about education (admittedly clouded by my anchoring my post in school experiences), I'm talking about kids picking these things up on their own because it's easy, fun and useful. Nobody would learn Word in school for the sake of learning Word, they learn it because it's a useful tool - the fact that there's a class is helpful, but mostly tangential.