geocom:
Honestly by the time they get to the workplace the tech is going to have changed.
I finished school in 2008 Years 11-13 where Mac and the time before was windows and a pre ribbon word and on mac we used word for mac which at the time was also pre ribbon and pages had only just released. For work i have always used pages.
The thing that is important thing to learn is the thing you do in the word processor not the word processor it's self.
Also if it was me i would not be accepting .pages or .docx format documents for handing in anyway both have issues when being transferred to a different system such as fonts. PDF's have become the defacto standard because they deal with these issues.
PDFs have their own issues, trust me they are not as "universal" as most people think they are.