[Faark]

Feels like what you are describing was the state of affairs like 15 years ago when i was in secondary school. We had an "Informationstechnischer Grundkurs" teaching office / excel and a separate programming course for guys like me who wanted to focus on that. I don't really follow the state of education that closely, but would be quite surprised if the latter is not at least more widely available now.

Does everyone need to know how to program? I don't know, probably not. Us humans specializing is the only way we have to handle the huge amount of knowledge necessary to support our society. I certainly would have a hard time just surviving by myself. Also education slots are limited, we'd have to abolish other courses in exchange. This obviously will generate opposition.

Now let imagine we have an open slot to teach "CS" for 90min a week for a year in such a young age. What do you teach that would actually be useful to most of them later on? A bit of python? Basic C, since it doesn't come with many complicated abstractions on top? Javascript, since many of its courses quickly give colorful results? Even the programming bachelor I later did had trouble answering those questions, they switched from c->java->c++ to teaching 3 courses java. Plus all the languages other courses used and had to teach pretty much from scratch.

[zrobotics]

Personally, I think there is far too much focus on 'which language', rather than on the fundamentals of how to think/reason about a program, troubleshooting, and exposure to the actual documentation. Once you have a solid grasp of one language, picking up others becomes much easier. So someone who only has Javascript experience would likely be able to at least grok the basic structure of a c++ program. I feel the main problem with all the intro courses I have ever taken was too much reliance on textbooks/tutorials, and too much desire to over-simplify. I remember multiple people I took CS101 (Java) with who had no idea how to do anything outside of eclipse, and when they wanted to expand their skills through self-study had no idea how to use the documentation in a helpful manner. They knew how to write a class diagram, but all functions & classes had been introduced piecemeal, so they got overwhelmed looking at the official docs & just gave up out of frustration.

That said, I don't think something like haskell or straight assembler is a good choice, but any of the C-likes or Python would be fine, the differences just aren't great enough to matter much for the absolute beginner. A strong case could be made for Javascript, simply for ease of development, since any computer is almost guaranteed to have the basic software for writing, executing, & debugging. It is far from my favorite language, but for early intro courses I think pedagogy is far more important than language or tooling.

And personally, I feel that the only 'CS' that should be required for all students is keyboarding. Does someone who wants to go into the trades (excepting trades like machining) really have any urgent need for programming? However, almost any job will require typing skills.

Students have limited time, and I think it's foolish to force everyone to learn to program. Those classes have their benefits, but so do music classes. But, given avaliable time and resources, should we also require all students to learn an instrument?