Alright, I'm going to go deeply out of the topic here, but it's necessary in order to give you a full answer, for you to understand my frustration, and for you to understand how fucked up that obligatory subject could really get.

> What country are you from?

Bosnia & Herzegovina.

> I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or JavaScript.

Yup, I am all up for that. I am the first one to applaud and donate to smaller projects that are aiming in that direction.

Meanwhile, the government (on the district level, think: District of Columbia) signs a deal with Microsoft in which Microsoft gives a substantial discount to their education platform, such projects get shoved away, and people are now being taught in other slightly more up-to-date Microsoft-dependent technologies. Of course, none of the licenses are provided to the students themselves to have at home, so piracy is at its peak. In fact, the only cases of prosecution for piracy I've ever heard of inside Bosnia is the prosecution of businesses that can't show Microsoft's licenses when asked for them by the regulators. Once you are being asked for them, you better have the boxes or receipts somewhere in your closet. It doesn't matter if you're using them or not. Good luck convincing the random inspector that your company is not Microsoft-reliant.

In other words, I haven't seen anyone using any non-Microsoft OS before I started messing around with Linux-based operating systems myself when I was 18. To this day, out of all the local people I've ever met personally, I could list on top of my fingers the amount of local people I've seen using non-Microsoft OS (as in Macbooks, the amount of Linux users I've met in person is still 0).

From my time in that middle-school equivalent, I've also went to a IT-specialized high school and an IT-specialized college. Around 90% of all IT-related topics, 90% of them you are simply unable to run on anything not made by Microsoft. The moment I found out I was supposed to start learning server administration exclusively in Microsoft Server was the moment when I quit that college. I've managed to win some smaller fights (like submitting essays in .odt instead of .doc(x) which was listed as "obligatory"), but this was way out of my reach.

So yeah, it's no longer just the ridiculous educational system, it's a ridiculous educational system that's now backed up financially by Microsoft. The only hope of breaking this monopoly is during the negotiations about joining the EU, but realistically, that won't happen any time soon unless something drastic happens.

So yeah, here I am, two years after I've made that decision to quit college, with two years of work experience working with open source exclusively, on a Mozilla-sponsored fellowship, into month four of waiting for the work permit to get the fuck away from this country, writing this comment on HN because I'm technically unemployed if the EU country I'm applying for work permit with doesn't give me a work visa really soon. If it goes well, I will finally break free of the chains possessed by simply being interested in the "wrong thing" in a wrong country. If not, realistically, the best I could do to even have a job in the IT field in my country is to return to Microsoft.