Tell that to very prominent VC's in NYC that have been blowing this horn for years in contradiction to your sentiments…[0].
I think public schools (and schools in general as an institution) face the same problem universities are facing: the obsolescence on such a mechanism to effectively and efficiently disseminate knowledge as more and more resources are allocated for signaling of such rather than acquiring/pursuit of it.
I don't follow. A shell is just a software interface and interpreter like any other. You learn it by reading its manuals, documentation and proceeding to experiment. Whether you acquire the information directly or indirectly via tutorials, examples and other third-party sources is of little relevance to the point. It's an activity divorced from the scope of public education.
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiments, I was just more or less stating that, there are monied interests in NYC like Fred Wilson, where if you go back through all his blog posts (or crawl the links in the sitemaps and enumerate all the instances of "kids/children" and "programming/code" in the same sentence, or within 1 or two words of each other you will see that it is greater than 0), who feel that it needs to be in the scope of public education.
Whenever a good thing™ comes along, there seems to be the tendency for some in a society to want to jam it down others throats (this is far from being the only "We need ____ in schools, NOW!" initiative), and the more ways the better.
I think public schools (and schools in general as an institution) face the same problem universities are facing: the obsolescence on such a mechanism to effectively and efficiently disseminate knowledge as more and more resources are allocated for signaling of such rather than acquiring/pursuit of it.
[0] http://avc.com/