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Hacker High School Starts to Spread
thelordx writes "Hacker High School, an initiative from the non-profit Institute for Security and Open Methodology, pioneers of the OSSTMM have received some media coverage for their Hacker High School Program. It's a license-free open-source program that provides security and privacy-awareness teaching materials to teachers.
Here's the link to the BBC stream and article about the project."
The lesson plans are not on hacking, but are merely a slightly glorified how to securely use your computer.
As it is, CS education initiatives in high school are pretty disappointing, with the advanced placement curriculum being essentially "learn the syntax of java" and with more developed initiatives such as "Teach Scheme!" not being as widespread as they deserve. However, this pseudo hacker stuff surely takes the cake for being a true disappointment.
The words wizard, guru, and samurai already have specialized meanings in the Jargon File; even though their meanings are very close to the meaning of "hacker," they have a more precise definition; according to the Jargon file, "A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it," and a guru "implies not only wizard skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others." A samurai is "a hacker who hires out for legal cracking jobs, snooping for factions in corporate political fights, lawyers pursuing privacy-rights and First Amendment cases, and other parties with legitimate reasons to need an electronic locksmith."
The terms wizard, guru, and samurai already have specialized meanings in the Jargon File. The definitions all relate back to "hacker," but hacker is a bit more general, while these other terms are a bit more precise.
Hackers: Originally used to describe a computer
enthusiast who pushed a system to its highest
performance through clever programming.
Now I wonder why I hate the media....