They should learn both. Any CS student who does not understand simple hardware concepts such as page faults does not deserve a degree. Similarly, every CS student should learn functional and imperative programming. Period.
But this would produce a generation of students that know how to do things that we already know how to do really well already. Maybe it would be better if we skipped page faults and taught things that would advance CS. CS has moved on to more interesting areas that simple page faults. Think about how massively parallel systems run, or how distributed databases handle consistency, or high volume scaling, or NLP or any of the other areas of CS that are far more interesting that page faults.
Language details are all academic, pointless debates to be had by people who like one over another where the differences are often trivial (C++/Java). If you have a great mind and can understand what languages are doing then either will do you just fine.
I'd rather not teach the next generation of CS under-graduates the same old stuff that I did (and yes that included how the VAX-11/750 - one of the first to do so if I recall correctly - didn't have to have all a programs data or code in memory...)
You need to understand what has come before so that you can build upon it effectively. Taking past progress for granted will not help develop the future; if anything, you'll get a lot more reinvented wheels.
Among the higher-level problems you mentioned, how many of them are interrelated? I'd rather see professors cover material that is useful in 80% of cases, even if they are well-trodden topics - students can specialise in the rest. In my CS course (UK) we studied parallel systems, including MapReduce; distributed databases and NLP can be studied optionally along with several other topics of much higher level than mere page faults. That said, not all CS courses are created equal.
you do not need to understand how your compiler works, or how De Morgans law is responsible for all those NOT gates in your CPU to produce useful and meaningful CS.
Page faults illustrate the idea of the memory hierarchy, which is one of the most important architectures in computer science. Programmers who don't understand the memory hierarchy write slow code. You also can never do "massively parallel systems run, or how distributed databases handle consistency, or high volume scaling, or NLP or any of the other areas of CS that are far more interesting that page faults" without virtual memory, paging, and page faults.
You're confusing what's important to you with what's actually important.
"Programmers who don't understand the memory hierarchy write slow code" is just nonsense.
Most programmers today use languages where they aren't even aware of, or able to manipulate in any way how and when memory is managed. And this trend will continue as the hardware their programs run on are increasingly virtualized.
Let's face it, virtual memory is a done deal, its now fundamental until we find computer hardware architectures that don't ever have address spaces that exceed the physically addressable memory. With virtualized kernels, possibly its a better solution to boot operating systems that have no concept of constained memory resources, and let the virtualizer do the paging.
