May I be slightly selfish, and ask a question to all of
    you who have a CS degree? Did you learn programming as 
    part of your CS education? Regardless, what's you opinion 
    about the way programming was taught?

I learned about programming (aside from some casual observations) as a freshman EE student. After my first year I decided that the heavy math and physics requirements of EE would kick my ass, and that I much preferred the opinionated reality offered by writing software. So I changed my major to CS.

Programming per se was poorly taught. There was little emphasis on long-term code management, and only moderate emphasis on writing clean modular code. So I learned better coding practices from more skilled developers while school taught me language syntax and concepts.

All through college I was fascinated by cellular automata and artificial life, so every time I had a new language class I went off to write CA code, trying to make them run faster, cleaner, and provide nicer options. Pscal, Fortran, C; never got around to doing CA in COBOL though; dropped out of that class. :)