[Pxtl]

North American high-school programming classes were not known for quality. Programming was not generally a high priority item for the school boards so teachers were often completely left on their own for curriculum, and often were amateur programmers at best (if programmers at all).

The end result is that university CS programs are run with the assumption that highschool students had zero prior experience with programming.

There's a reason that so many software geeks are hardcore libertarians and Bill Gates was fighting to reform teaching into a meritocracy - the educational system basically ignored their core skill-set and so the students were often self-taught. Obviously schools are playing catch-up now, but you can't change the past experiences of two generations of programmers.

[rch]

The computer science AP classes at my high school were taught by the typing teacher, after she took a summer course. The instruction consisted entirely of the slides from that course, followed by time to work independently on pretty much whatever, in Pascal.