> Teaching is not the problem. Anyone can pick up a free online book (I like to recommend SICP or HTDP) and learn everything they need to be a professional prog

> Teaching is not the problem. Anyone can pick up a free online book (I like to recommend SICP or HTDP) and learn everything they need to be a professional programmer. That is true, and it is a very good thing indeed. However IMHO there is an important thing missing: Feedback for your mistakes. This is something that every good education should have: an examination of your results, and feedback on what to do better. Especially in CS, it is very easy to produce something that technically works, but is error prone, fragile, inefficient, broken, hard to understand or maintain, etc... These are all things you do not learn without human feedback. Technically you can give that human feedback to yourself, by reading the stuff you wrote 6 months earlier. That takes at least 6 months for every iteration though :-)