When I was in High School, all I got was VB (and the teacher nearly flunked me for using events).

In Uni it's kinda hard to motivate the school to teach Perl, since they're kinda stuck on Java. Most teachers that do Java, are newbies themselves (and used to teach COBOL *shiver*).
My math professor looked at Perl briefly and decided to go for Python to teach freshmen the concepts of programming (altho I pointed out that the matrix computations he wanted to do, were not THAT hard in Perl :) ).

The only people really aware of what Perl is, are the Sys Admins, and I doubt they have time to teach.

Greetz
Beatnik
... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.