[alexbell]

I've seen rms speak before, and one point he made really hit home. It is absolutely inexcusable for a school to teach using what is essentially a mystery black box. If a student wants to be able to open up the source code and see how things work, they should be able to.

[gaius]

That's clearly nonsense, tho'. In school you teach at a level of abstraction, it's the same anywhere. We don't require someone to make paper and ink before they learn to write. We don't make people become mechanics before they learn to drive. People with the interest study those things after their basic schooling is complete.

[xenophonf]

Dunno where you went to school, but my CS education taught me the full stack - computer architecture, a wide variety of programming languages and styles, abstractions from simple data types to objects, and language design/implementation. We went up and down levels of abstraction, and my teachers put an emphasis on knowing how things worked or how to use tools in a general sense (instead of just using C++ or Java or Objective-C or Visual Studio for the entire baccalaureate program). Being able to look at existing code bases was really helpful in this regard, even though Appel et al's Tiger compiler is a tiny little toy compared to real compilers like GCC or LLVM. It's anecdotal but I can tell you that so far in my career, being able to examine IT services from the business process (good ol' layer 8) all the way down to the electrons whizzing by has been a definitive advantage, and one not shared by many of my fellow IT admins or software developers.

As for your car analogy, I think we should do a better job of teaching new drivers how cars work, how they perform under different operating conditions, the physics and the mechanics involved, etc. Again it's anecdotal, but I saw my child's driving improve quite a bit after taking one of those car control clinics, in which a solid understanding of the physics and construction of cars played an important part.

[gaius]

Your secondary school? Really? I call shenanigans.

[xenophonf]

Whoops, sorry - I didn't realize you meant K-12.