| I agree with the reasons the parent provided, especially that teachers teach the content without providing a "why?" What I suspect generally that I cannot prove (yet): When teachers teach things that are easy to teach but not directly important to learn, students are distracted by the surface irrelevance. Of course the underlying concepts and designs of sorting are important to understand. But, that the GP asked, "Do professional programmers actually think about this? Is this relevant?" means the curriculum has a problem. The problem is: students are asking meta-questions that should've been answered by the "why?" mentioned above. In sum, I agree with the parent, especially with: > So the real problem is that sometimes teachers just focus on teaching sorting but don't explain (and sometimes they don't have it clear either) that it's not sorting but a framework of mind what you want to give them. It's easy (possibly... lazy? Again, this is what I suspect that I cannot prove) for a CS department to declare "Students will learn [list of topics] by examining and implementing sorting algorithms." By contrast, it's a hard to 1. interest students by presenting them with problems not fossilized exercises. 2. ensure to students' parents and taxpayers and employers that they know the "basics|fundamentals|theory" |