I'm not sure that all the examples in the article really demonstrate the same thing. Debugging is not the same thing as knowing the rules for how to use commas. Students who are behind on basic punctuation and grammar can be put in remedial classes -- and often are, that's what happened at my university. But debugging seems very different. The condition of "I wrote a program, but it doesn't work and I don't know why," and I don't know if teaching a set of debugging skills or techniques will help a student who can't even form a hypothesis of why their program is broken.
The bigger question is about the teaching of fundamentals generally. Of course schools should teach them, but it is fair for classes to have prerequisites and to expect students to have met them on arrival to a class. It is unfair to the students who have done the work to slow down the class for stragglers who haven't met the prerequisites. Those skills should be taught in a different class that the students take first.
As for the chem professor who didn't want to help the student during office hours, he sounds like a professor who doesn't really like to teach. This is an endemic problem of major research universities that is probably really at the heart of the main question of the article, but which won't be solved by structural changes to curricula, but rather by changes to the incentive structure of university faculty. Professors at major research universities (in the US, at least) aren't incented to teach well, nor are they selected for their teaching ability. (They are incented to get good student feedback evaluations, but that's hardly the same thing.)
The bigger question is about the teaching of fundamentals generally. Of course schools should teach them, but it is fair for classes to have prerequisites and to expect students to have met them on arrival to a class. It is unfair to the students who have done the work to slow down the class for stragglers who haven't met the prerequisites. Those skills should be taught in a different class that the students take first.
As for the chem professor who didn't want to help the student during office hours, he sounds like a professor who doesn't really like to teach. This is an endemic problem of major research universities that is probably really at the heart of the main question of the article, but which won't be solved by structural changes to curricula, but rather by changes to the incentive structure of university faculty. Professors at major research universities (in the US, at least) aren't incented to teach well, nor are they selected for their teaching ability. (They are incented to get good student feedback evaluations, but that's hardly the same thing.)