See I see a problem here. You say you were a physics tutor, which I would say means minimum post-graduate education. What's missing here is your assumption that YOU learned your critical thinking in high school which might not have been the case. We tend to forget, and i've done this myself, how hard things are when learning them for the first time. I have a younger brother, and when helping him with some maths stuff, I would do like you did, try and get him to work problems out for himself with no guiding. Didn't work. I could see the path to go down, and I thought it was easy, but its because I had all this extra knowledge as well, it had nothing to do with the current state of the school system or anything like that.
Im just finishing a Soft Eng degree and the first language we learned was C. Then throughout the course this was the language we 'had' to program in for any algorithmic task. (ie. algorithms, networks etc.) Of course some subjects such as Interactive Systems lent themselves to Java, but C is still used in places.
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See I see a problem here. You say you were a physics tutor, which I would say means minimum post-graduate education. What's missing here is your assumption that YOU learned your critical thinking in high school which might not have been the case. We tend to forget, and i've done this myself, how hard things are when learning them for the first time. I have a younger brother, and when helping him with some maths stuff, I would do like you did, try and get him to work problems out for himself with no guiding. Didn't work. I could see the path to go down, and I thought it was easy, but its because I had all this extra knowledge as well, it had nothing to do with the current state of the school system or anything like that.
Im just finishing a Soft Eng degree and the first language we learned was C. Then throughout the course this was the language we 'had' to program in for any algorithmic task. (ie. algorithms, networks etc.) Of course some subjects such as Interactive Systems lent themselves to Java, but C is still used in places.