I really don't know why this is but it seems like today's education highly focuses on fancy buttons and Word processing instead of ANSI art.

It may well be that the teachers themselves have very little to do with the bits. Byte - rarely. Words - not often. 734 bit floating point arithmetic - YES.....

I have teached for one year in elementary school for mathematics and IT "science". I really liked the job. Unfortunately I got fired because during the first week we disassembled the class computers and assembled them back in - repeated 7 times for every group there were. The subject was to learn about how computers are constructed.... We should have been reading that from a book instead of looking inside of the real thing because the "delicate" computers might get defunct (they did but we fixed them).... I hated that.

The other week - as we wiped the hard disks empty to start installing different OS systems - everyone could choose what they wanted to install. I had M$DOS, Windows, OS2 and linux disks with me. That was too much for the headmaster. I was strictly told to keep it on with the books and not to fiddle with the computers. BTW - the subject was "The Operating System".... I hated that too - but I loved the kids as they were eyeballing the OS2 and MsDos instead of Windows which they told to be all too boring.

So this is also a governance issue. You are not allowed to do things that really might interest the kids. IMHO the kids were faschinated of what they saw - and further more they got some self confidence with ordinary computers - they are just like any other electronic equipment - just easier to assemble.

I was promised to be sacked by the end of the season or even earlier but they were not able to find replacement... The third week I had a large collection of ferrite memories, electronic tube based calculator and other stuff. The subject was "Computer History". Each and every of my students passed the national tests with good marginal. But still I got sacked. I hated that.