Which would be the advantages and benefits of school or college teaching Perl to it's students?

A concise answer to that question is: "it depends"

Mostly it depends on the goals and desires of the overall course curriculum in question.

I was once tasked with teaching an intermediate course in Unix Programming to college level continuaing education students.

This course was supposedly a course to take budding programmers and teach them "how to be able to program in a Unix environment" which is a very ambiguous goal IMnsHO.

One of the failings of the fine institution in question that I had to deal with was a total lack of any sort of curriculum or coordination between other courses within the program.

After much Q&A with the director of the program I came to the conclusion that what they wanted me to teach my students was an all-inclusive course in Unix concepts (file systems, process lifespan, etc. etc.) and do it in 10 weeks. Great! I was going to be giving these poor students of mine a drink of water from a 3" firehose.

Hence after preparing my own curriculum and preparing to teach wonder subjects like fork(), exec(), file system structures and other subjects replete with C API programming examples I found on my first night of class that I had no common ground to talk to my students from. They had no prior C language knowlege and the only programming language they had any exposure to was Java and/or Visual Basic. Hardly an auspicious start to a class where the concepts I was tasked with teaching required some knowledge of the underlying system and system calls.

As strange as this might seem to some folks, but not so strange if you think about it for a while I decided that rather than try and teach my students a crash course in C programming (pointers anyone?) I decided that I could teach a crash course in Perl.

From within the confines of Perl I could demonstrate what a child process inherits from its parent process. I could demonstrate IPC. I could even assign my students homework assignments that let them demonstrate these principles and other Unix related principles for themselves.

Best of all, compared to teaching a course in C, teaching Perl was a fairly quick process. My students were by no means Perl gurus at the end of the 3 nights I spent on the subject, but they could write workable code even if it would be code that would make the average monk on PM cringe. (They were newbies after all.)

Lastly, I did them a service IMHO in giving them another tool in their toolbox when they go out in the Real World® and ply their trade. They were only being taught Java and/or Visual Basic and Perl was something the school in its infinite wisdom hadn't thought to add to the curriculum.

As a side note: in my class handouts I made sure they were armed with lots of web links to on-line references to learn more about the Perl language, lists of books to add to their reading list as well as a link to the PM site.