You've misinterpreted my post. Things such as COBOL, BASIC or Pascal should not be thought at all in schools, not to mention punched cards and direct machine code - those are dead technologies, just like we'll have a numerous more in the following decades. And I certainly don't consider myself as the part of 'old-school programmers', if such a thing even exists.

Actually, I'm totally against teaching ANY language or specific technology at schools when it comes to fast-paced technologies such as IT. Why? Well, because you cannot change the educational plan and program several times a year to keep up with the IT industry. And you cannot tailor any specific sort of programmers in school. Well, you can, and then they are nothing more than developers for a specific language/platform and their profession dies as soon as that technology dies - usually within one decade thus totally diminishing the point of schooling in the first place. By the time you finish your average college/univ, the technology you started to explore in the first year might as well be dead, so apart from a huge waste of time you get nothing from it.

What should be taught at schools is how computers operate and do their 'magic'. Students, future programmers, need to understand that everything boils down to the simplest algebra function of them all - adding. No matter how many layers you put in-between, the end result is always the same. And it will remain like that at least for the next couple of decades (until quantum computing becomes a reality), which validates the reason of teaching it. They need to understand digital electronics - not in a way that electronics engineers need to, a simple block-diagrams should suffice. They need to understand the basics of programming - pseudo code is more than suitable for such purpose (at least it won't teach them some bad programming habits from which most of the languages out there suffer). They need to understand that:

and

and

Are essentially doing the same thing, it's just a matter of syntax; they only differ on the intermediary levels, and their performance depends on how close can their compilers can bring it to the essential, computer-friendly adding of two numbers. Instead of any specific implementation, future programmers can learn all that using even plain English:

Yes, this is as valid code as the previous examples. You can even write a compiler for this pseudo code and have it execute the same as C++ or Java would. Teach the stars of the future how to program and what programming is, the syntax is irrelevant - after all, in 10 years they will probably use quite different syntax that they've learned in school.

Anyway, not to get too off-topic, when I mentioned punched cards, I didn't mean that those should be taught at school, but they certainly give you a lot of perspective when it comes to programming. In today's day and age programmers rarely have the opportunity to experience what all their code boils down to, and software turned into a mysterious vapor, it's a good thing to see that your program actually does something except printing shiny pixels on a screen. You know, something physical, something you can touch and feel with all your senses. Such an experience awes any passionate programmer.