Informatics education: Europe cannot afford to miss the boat

ACM 2013 report (no ph3n0l translation included)

It  is  a  matter  of  grave  concern  to  Informatics  Europe  and  ACM  Europe  that European   nations are harming   their   primary   and   secondary school students, both  educationally  and  economically,  by  failing  to  offer  them  an education in the fundamentals of informatics.
Continuation  of  this  failure  would put  the  European  economy  at  risk by causing  students  to  lag  behind  those  of  many  other  countries,  including emerging  but  increasingly  competitive  countries  (India  is  the  most  obvious example but by far not the only one).
Informatics  education  must  become,  along  with  digital  literacy,  an obligatory  part  of  general  education.  Appropriate  informatics  education enhances  human  capability  in  the  form  of  both  practical  skills,  essential  for  success  in  all  human  disciplines,  and  conceptual  benefits,  in  the  form  of effective  ways  of  reasoning  about  the  world  (“computational  thinking”). All workforces  across  Europe  will  be  dependent  on  future  Informatics  education to retain our living standards. Informatics will be necessary to future economic health:  this  is  where  the  next  generation  is going  to  be  doing  the  important work and Europe overlooks this at its peril.