While programming may be a trade skill, problem solving is not. Programming is a concrete and applicable way to teach and develop skills such as analyzing problems, decomposing them into smaller problems, and designing solutions. I think that these skills are very important for people to have.

Teaching a "programming course" that gives students these skills as its goal, and programming being the means to achieve that end would be wonderful. The course need not be about stacks and queues, binary trees, bubble sort, or computing factorials and Fibonacci numbers simply for the sake of learning programming in a vocational manner. Programming can be a tool to teach problem solving.

I think it would be a shame to make a course mandatory if it was that vocationally specialized. It would be even worse if it was a class on Java or Python or any specific language where it solely focuses on syntax and students don't even learn concepts, but become monkeys trained that can spit out some code and do not really understand much.

Unfortunately education in the united states has generally become rote memorization, training for tests, and baby sitting. For this reason students could really use general skills such as problem solving, and programming is a fine tool for teaching this, but programming should not be the sole purpose of a mandatory course. Yet for these reasons, any course in problem solving that uses programming as a vessel will devolve into syntax memorization and solving useless and trivial exercises. This is especially true if its viewed solely as a "programming class", so its vital that the programming aspect of any such course be thought of as a teaching tool and not as the sole purpose of the class.

Not everyone is interested in reading/writing, or any sort of English. Get over it. Forcing every kid to take English (and "forcing" is the right word) is like forcing every kid to learn how to do research and write a report (and NOT something useful, like reading and responding to email).

With all the cutbacks in arts and general sciences that take a broad approach to education, why are you wasting their precious school time and especially-precious-now school money on such a specific skill?


And with regard to your last paragraph:
> Whatever general skills they learn in this
> class, they can learn better by studying a more
> general subject.
Well, what "general subject" would you propose instead? No matter what is taught you can say that it is too specific. Or if you want some general topic taught at a high level with no applications being used, then students wont grasp it.

Dreamweaver has a very good editor with syntax highlighting. Just because it can do WYSIWYG with it doesn't mean it can only do WYSIWYG editing.