Why aren't good design and efficiency on the list of the things I'm supposed to?CodeX said:If you go into such depth with every topic you won't cover half of your supposed to
If you really mean schools (and the teachers, and then the students) are mailing it in like this, it should be no surprise why science education in the US is in such bad shape, and why jobs are going overseas.
I'd expect the first thing that someone learns about programming is there's more than one way to skin the cat. (Some languages, like PERL, use this as their rallying cry. TMTOWTDI, or whatever.) So then the next thing to learn would be how to choose one of the different ways, wouldn't it?
You can learn these things independently of learning any programming lanauge at all!