the normal curriculum generally didn't provide any exposure to computers beyond "Keyboarding" and "Computer Applications," meaning MS Office. I graduated from high school in 2006 and there was really nothing made widely available by my school. There was a vocational class for computer operations (only 4 students including myself took it), which was actually quite useful -- intro to networking concepts, intro to programming (VB 6), and all of the information needed to get CompTIA's A+ certification. Throughout the year, I was able to bat ideas around with the teacher, including the idea of making a beowulf cluster (just 3 or 4 nodes) to showcase some of the things computers could be used for. The class was the last half of the day and really helped solidify my basis into computing. At one point, the teacher had the network engineer for the school system come in to teach us how to terminate fiber (which we later ran to provide network access for the machine trades vocational class). I really have some fond memories of that class and to this day, I'm friends with the teacher.
My experience was *not* normal by any stretch, though. As I mentioned, there were only 4 students (later dropped down to just 3) in the class from the entire county. I was the only person from the hosting school (1000-1500 students). The teacher I had that year returned to industry the very next year and, from what I heard, the quality of the class dropped tremendously when his successor took over. To my knowledge, the class is still the same poor quality that it was after he left.
As far as I know, learning anything related to computers in high school (in most midwest counties) is learned the same way as it was a decade or two before -- individuals being motivated to learn for its own sake and befriending others who are like-minded. LAN parties, though passed off as completely useless by parents (more often than not), provide(ed) the greatest source of computing knowledge exposure -- setting up the LAN (and segmenting it from the user's parents' use), troubleshooting why a computer would fail to work, troubleshooting why a pirated game wouldn't run on one machine when everyone else wanted to play, and understanding physical infrastructure requirements (i.e. power) are routinely dealt with in the environment of a high school LAN party, and are directly applicable to industry (with much more learning outside of these parties to fill in the gaps, of course).