Teaching Concurrency

Idit Keidar invited me to submit a note to a distributed computing column in SIGACT News devoted to teaching concurrency. In an introduction, she wrote that my note “takes a step back from the details of where, what, and how, and makes a case for the high level goal of teaching students how to think clearly.” What does it say about the state of computer science education that one must make a case for teaching how to think clearly?