A Critique of Abelson and Sussman

"Unfortunately, the use of Scheme and SICP quickly dwindled again in the early 1990s. After working with SICP and Scheme for a while, instructors started to complain. Some said that SICP's content was too difficult for students outside of MIT. Others blamed Scheme directly, claiming that functional programming in Scheme was too different from programming in other languages. Even the functional programming community criticized the SICP approach; around this time, Wadler wrote his Critique of SICP and Scheme (Wadler, 1987).
Nowadays the critics even include professors at MIT, where the book and the course have become legends. Jackson and Chapin, who both have significant experience teaching SICP at MIT, recently wrote that:
 [f]rom an educational point of view, our experience suggests that undergraduate computer science courses should emphasize basic notions of modularity, specification, and data abstraction, and should not let these be displaced by more advanced topics, such as design patterns, object-oriented methods, concurrency, functional languages, and so on (Jackson & Chapin, 2000).

In short, SICP, Scheme, and functional programming don't prepare students properly for other programming courses and thus fail to meet a basic need."

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf

"High school teachers who implement HTDP report similar success stories as colleges but in a less measurable manner. Still, the HTDP curriculum has had an interesting measurable effect concerning female students. Several instructors reported that female students like the HtDP curriculum exceptionally well. In a controlled experiment, an HTDP-trained instructor taught a conventional AP curriculum and the Scheme curriculum to the same three classes of student. Together the three classes consisted of over 70 students. While all students preferred our approach to programming, the preference among females was a stunning factor of four."
Chicks dig HTDP.