[vezzy-fnord]

Not to mention the common argument that "ubiquitous computing will necessitate that everyone have a high degree of technical literacy" is false. Computers are heading from becoming tools to appliances and circuits. You'll never interact with most of them directly, and when you do, it'll be through an abstracted shell or interface of some sort. The actual internals will be arcane to most, running some form of Contiki, QNX, specifically tailored variant of embedded Linux, or whatnot.

We're already seeing this happen with smartphones and tablets. They offer an ecosystem of applications and network-enabled technologies that are useful to users, but in the end, they're digital handcuffs.

The practical benefits of teaching programming will be outweighed by the sheer incompetence and farcical mess that compromises public education in general. There's no way I, personally, can trust such a system to make anything worthwhile of this.