I make this same argument for today's Code Schools. They teach high-level language/frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and the graduates can do productive work, but often have no idea what's happening underneath. Take serialization for instance -- with a limited understanding, the DOM just somehow magically stores data and retrieves it later; but the operator has no understanding of a database, or knowledge of SQL, or a sense of the value of referential integrity, or foreign key indexes, or how to use explain plan to see where the time is going, etc. So when it comes time to tune/refactor/redesign for performance, the student is lost and goes off looking for some Gem to drop in and solve the problem.

Perhaps it's just a natural stratification of the industry, but it leaves me feeling uncomfortable and frustrated when a jr engineer doesn't understand what's happening underneath the veneer of Rails (not to pick on Rails solely, this could also apply with many other frameworks & languages - I just see this the most because it's the latest fad) and/or doesn't understand why reentrancy, interrupts, or parallelism with mutable items is dangerous and hard-as-hell to get right.

I would love to see more developers with at least a passing familiarity with the basic concepts of computing, of the sort presented in Chuck Petzold's book CODE (which I highly recommend).

[just read my post - I really am sounding like a grumpy old man these days, but I'm clicking "reply" anyway. Stay off my lawn. ;)]