Never heard of him. Of course I went to school before The Ultra Secret, so all that stuff was still secret.
Nothing at all. I think the only class I ever took where learning about Turing would be relevant was ninth-grade world history, and when you consider all the other things that have to be covered in world history, it’s not surprising that he didn’t make the cut.
I went to school in Britain in the 90s, and I honestly can’t remember if we were taught about Alan Turing or not. It would have been a brief paragraph in the WWII history textbook if so. I definitely did learn about him as a teen, including his sexuality, arrest and eventual suicide, but that may well have been from a documentary on TV.
Bletchley park and cracking the enigma code had been kept secret after the war, and even by the early 90s were not widely known about. It all came out around this time, which would be why it was on TV, and the way most people heard about it. It’s probably included in the syllabus now.
I also learned about the Turing test, Turing machines etc as a teen, but from popular science books, not school.
Maybe ironically, based on what US posters have said, a lot of my history lessons in the UK were devoted to modern American history, and AFAIK that is still the case today.
Who? 
I was in high school in the 1970s. I only learned of Turing in the late 1980s by reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas.
Ah, okay, I looked him up and realized that I watched a Netflix movie about him and the others who worked on that stuff during the war. I had just forgotten his name. It’s a pretty good movie called, “The Imitation Game”, and it got 90% from Rotten Tomatoes.
High school in the late 80s and he was never mentioned. Social Studies/History was a rush to get the required state-mandated points in and Computers was 25 kids sharing 20 IBM DOS boxes and trying to fumble through Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.
I first heard of Enigma before that (mid 80s?) in a copy of Compute! magazine (or maybe Compute! Gazette) which had an Enigma code breaking emulator you could program. Naturally it touched on what Enigma was but I don’t remember if it mentioning Turing. Usually references to Engima focused more on the cool “taken from a captured U-Boat” part than the math nerd parts.
He was a hugely important figure in the history of computing (arguably the founder of the entire field of computer science), but the history of computing isn’t a topic likely to come up in most high school classes. His work on cryptography in World War II was also important, but there are a lot of other important things to cover about World War II (the Manhattan Project, for instance, is a lot more relevant to history than Bletchley Park was). So it’s not surprising that there’d be little or no mention of him in most high-schoolers’ educations.
For what it’s worth, one of the classes I teach is Discrete Math, and Turing’s work is likely to come up there. When it does, I do mention that he was gay, and suffered horrible persecution for it that led to his suicide, but I don’t spend much time on that, because the primary focus in a math class is on his work, not on his life.
Turing probably also comes up in AP Computer Science, though I can’t speak definitively there. Most non-AP high school computer classes probably don’t go deep enough to touch on Turing (they’d be focused on a much higher level of abstraction)
High school class of '86, and this also pretty much describes my experience (except no PFLAG chapter, because we were a few years earlier. I don’t remember comprehending at all what gay people were in high school; it simply didn’t come up).
IIRC, he was never mentioned. (I was at high school in the UK in the 70s).
I know i had heard of him.. i suspect from reading Martin Gardner’s books.
Absolutely nothing. Why should we have?
I went to high school in the 80s, so this stuff was still pretty under wraps. We didn’t learn anything about it. Nothing in college (electrical engineering), that I remember. I think I came across the idea of a Turing Machine in a Hofstadter book, no mention of his code-breaking or his life.
Modern LLMs would likely pass a Turing Test, other than being able to respond too quickly.
A thousand years from now, when we are all electronic ghosts running on computing substrates, we may remember Turing as one of the most important historical entities that ever lived.
Or we may not. His name certainly never came up when I was at school in the 70s, but that is hardly surprising.
This is an anachronistic thing to say. You might as well say “I don’t understand why the leaders of the southern states didn’t agree with MLK and get rid of the Jim Crow laws”. In 1954 Britain (and for a long time afterwards ) it was absolutely considered a fact that homosexuality was a moral failing that was serious enough to be punishable by the criminal justice system, and homosexual acts rightly should exclude someone from doing sensitive security work (Cambridge Five notwithstanding;) ).
I mean that was still a pretty widely held view when I went to Turing’s alma mater Manchester, 40 years after his death. The tolerant view that was widespread there (in what was by then a center of the LGBT community) was actually pretty shocking to me (as a straight middle class kid who grew up in a rural community in the home counties where such views were absolutely not tolerated)
Additionally very very few people actually knew about bletchley park and Turing’s role in it in 1954, it’s not even clear those people would even have known about Turing’s prosecution.
I took a computer science class in high school where there was a very brief history lesson in the textbook, and it’s entirely possible he was mentioned (I only specifically remember Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper), but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have gone into his sexuality.
I came into mention this, specifically to say that it’s a terrible film.
I don’t mean as a piece of entertainment, from that lens its perfectly fine.
I don’t mean as a general history of Bletchley Park, although it’s not great at being that either.
I mean that as a celebration and commemoration of Alan Turing, it is an abomination and disgrace because it utterly vindicates the bigots who drove him to suicide.
Spoilers ahead:
The security services held that homosexuals could not be allowed access to classified material because they were prone to blackmail and thus couldn’t be trusted not to betray their country.
In the film, Alan Turing is shown betraying his country after being blackmailed over his homosexuality. This is not minor, it is a major plot point, and one that is made up out of whole cloth simply for the sake of dramatisation.
It’s morally abhorrent, factually inaccurate and intellectually defunct to portray Turing in this way, let alone in a film which is meant to give him the overdue recognition he deserves. Might as well spit on his grave.
(Like others, didn’t learn about it in school, did learn a lot through media/documentaries etc in late 90s early 2000s. E.g. Turing has a decent minor role in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.
Nothing that I recall. Of course, school was a long time ago, so I may have just forgotten. We mostly seemed to run out of time before getting to WW2 (except 10th grade, where the teacher was very into it, and, looking back on other things he taught, quite problematic - was only there one year). We definitely learned about Enigma, but if we learned any individual person’s name in that context, it did not stick in my head.
I picked up info about him from pop culture and then looking him up specifically at a later date.
Early 80s UK state school. Our computer science teacher was keen on Apple products and told us the urban legend about the Apple logo. (Supposedly Turing killed himself by taking cyanide injected into an apple. The logo with a bite mark was rumoured to reflect that.) That led into some discussion about Turing and his work on early computers and the Turing test. No mention of Bletchley as it was still mostly secret at that point.
How many people have heard of Tommy Flowers though?
I was at school in the 50s, and adding machines were as far as our computing knowledge went. Bletchley Park was still top secret and no one outside had even heard of the place, let alone what they did.
In the 60s, I applied for a job at Lyons (Confectionery and the ubiquitous corner houses). They had Britain’s first commercial computer (called Leo) which ran on thermionic valves that needed frequent replacement. It was probably in the late '70s/early '80s that I first knew who he was.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that nearly 10,000 people worked at BP, and It was the work of Alastair Denniston who first recruited Turing, Gordon Welchman and many others to continue the work he had been doing at The Admiralty. Harold Keen was the engineer who led the team that designed the first decoding “bombe”.
People tend to forget we used to live in that world. And that even known heroes had to keep their “moral turpitude” hidden or there would be no hesitation in taking you down if it became public “scandal”, never mind someone whose deeds were a secret.
Sounds like someone was unable to communicate the prior worldview or to write it as a case of gratuituous bigotry.