I wasn't taught to use a debugger in my undergraduate degree, because you cannot use a debugger on a deck of punch cards. Even print statements are a luxury if you have a 15 minute turnaround on "jobs", etcetera.
I'm not saying that people should not be taught to use debuggers. Just that it is also important to learn to debug without this aid, because:
- it will help you understand your code better if you don't have to rely on a debugger, and
- there are situations where a sophisticated debugger won't be available.
On the latter point, I can also remember debugging a boot prom on an embedded device using a (rather expensive) logic analyzer to capture what was happening on the address / data lines.
