Basic training

(Response to thread about basics of learning web design.)

You naturally should run your school as you see fit. I definitely
see the value in your teaching students who take your courses, the
old fashioned way first so they understand table basics before using
the WYSYWYG table editor. If you also teach them to write HTML in a
text editor, so they understand HTML basics, before letting them use
a WYSYWYG HTML editor like GoLive, that is even better. You will have
produced website authors well grounded in the fundamentals.

I went though training like that in the Army. The theory was, that in
a combat situation, the rangefinder (the thing you focused with) on
the camera could get broken, and you could use your light meter, or
drop it in the mud. So they took the rangefinders off all the
cameras, and took away our light meters, then sent us out in the rain
to take pictures. They also gave us a little camera repair kit, so
we could fix our cameras when they got broken. We shot a lot a bad
pictures, but finally we got it right and it became second nature.
Fifty years later, I can still tell you whether it is 7.5 feet or 8
feet to the subject, and set my focus correctly. And I can still
look at a scene in the shade of a tree, and see in my mind "ASA 100 =
f/5.6 @ 1/50th second" ... and when I check it with a meter, the
meter will say the same. (ASA is now ISO, but the numbers are the
same.)

So if you are training your students in that manner, I'm all for it.