We had programming classes in high school in Romania, teaching Pascal or C. They don't really work. Some students don't understand programming. Others don't care. Only 20% of a class can actually program very simple programs by themselves. Only one or two can really understand what is going on. And sometimes they just want to do something else.
I'm Romanian, not everyone takes programming classes, very few do, only those enlisted in Mathematics-Informatics (in Romania curriculum varies greatly depending on what profile did you chose).
Indeed it has many problems. The first problem is that the Mathematics-Informatics profile in high school is considered elite, and every parent sends its children there. The effect is that the class will have the best, most intelligent students, but not necessarily the students interested in the curriculum. Neither the children or the parents know anything about the curriculum, all they know is that all the smart kids go there.
I've been in this class in one of the top-5 colleges, nation-wide. Some poll in the final year yielded 80% of the students hating both math and programming. Most preferred literature. Because of the inherent bias in Romanian education, the highest graded students will always be the ones who like liberal arts, and not the ones with a mathematical background and because of the way enlistment to high school works, these will be the ones that end in this class.
I mentioned I was in one of the top 5 classes nationwide to illustrate the second problem. Even though I was in one of the best classes, professors that taught programming were execrable, both in their talent as educators and in their talent as programmers. Incompetent is a word that's too mild to describe them. Reasons are easy to guess, high school teachers are paid poorly and anyone with any talent in CompSci will find a better job elsewhere. It's funny that the only two skilled professors that taught programming were two guys that did something completely different and only taught at high school because they enjoyed teaching and working with young students.
The third problem is that the curriculum is very abstract, way too abstract and far from reality, and very old, nothing feels like today, students are still required to write DOS applications with a DOS editor.
Math classes are no different. Only a handful of students will solve a math problem by themselves, others will just wait for teacher to show them what to do, and then repeat the procedure with hardly any understanding what is going on. The exams consist of problems that were already solved in classroom, it's enough to memorize the procedures and apply them to tasks on exams.
