...and the author has lost me (I did read the entire post though).
> If GitHub is down today I can't deploy anyway so I might as well embrace the server requirement as a perk.
Just because you can't deploy doesn't mean others can't as well. (Also, GitHub != Git. Period.)
Heck, the entire idea of DVCS is that you should be able to continue to work even after the servers are down. If you can't, then it's not Git problem.
It seems that the author didn't even understand the concepts and ideas, or the rationals behind DVCS, let alone Git. As a someone who had lived through the period when SVN was the only game in town (and not wanting to return to those dark days), seeing the author pining for the "good 'ol days" of SVN-like, centralized VCS is just silly.
The sad thing is, having a mandatory high school level statistics & probability class alone is not enough, you'll also need a good curriculum and a competent teacher to go along with it. Otherwise, it wouldn't work: a bad curriculum taught badly by a unmotivated or unqualified teacher will almost always fail to teach the intuition, or, even worse, alienates students from the materials.