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Many people have said "teach everyone to code!" or cheer-leaded for "learning to code!" but there hasn't been enough discussion about what a Computer Science component to a liberal arts education ought to look like.
In mathematics we have many lists and trees of what mathematicians think people ought to learn, what order it should be learned in.
Not so in computer science. We just say "learn to code" this would be like if math people said "learn to integrate functions!"
Notice that "integrating functions" is an outcome, a specific skill. A nice one that implies you know a lot of math... maybe. But not all math curriculums end there. There is a robust debate in math education about if we obsesses about The Calculus too much, everyone understands that doing some integrals isn't "knowing math."
I think most CS educators understand something similar but there is much less consensus about what it is that we are teaching if not "how to code."
For me the major topics of a CS education for the general public are:
* Computer Hardware
* Encoding and Decoding
* Logic and Control Structures
* Iterration
* Objects & Functions
* Databases
* Ethics and Applications
* User Interfaces and Design
* Computer Networks
* Computer History
This list keeps changing every time I revise my courses which is every year.
I added functions with objects, but students learn about functions almost from day one.
**File Structures need a clear home.
I always forget to add "History" and that is bad. I forget it in mathematics too, and I think this tendency causes big problems for both subjects.
@futurebird One of the most popular lessons I taught last year was the history of debugging. I found an awesome article with a picture of the first ever "bug" taped into one of Grace Hopper's notebooks! I need to revise this to do next week with my yr 7s.