I think the point is precisely to take design entirely out of the picture when you're teaching a new comer about programming. The fact that you have these problems and you can write executable recipes to solve them is already more than a mindful, everything else only confuses.
Reminds me of my AP Computer Sci class in high school a decade ago.
There were five people in the class, two of them being my brother and I. Two of the three left had zero prior programming experience. I could only sympathize with them as we rushed through the "syllabus" learning about everything from pointers to classes to inheritances.
Suffice to say they were completely lost and dreaded the class as much as math. I wasn't particularly good at math and could not imagine seeing programming as "math" because of how much fun I was having with VB/ASP(yes, you can chuckle) at home. I don't even want to think what perception of programming the two people left with.
I recently finished college with communications degree, make a decent wage doing programming and haven't needed to even think of the word "inheritance." Of course there are many great uses for it.
But to assume everyone should learn about it is to assume that everyone wants to be a genius programmer at google. There is so much gray in between the curriculum just ignores.
I still get a chuckle out of it, too. Then again, how else do you end up in a debate class full of basketball players who are gonna win the NCAAA Championship later in the semester?
