There's a little more to it. Ken Whistler is the vice chair of the Unicode Technical Committee [1], and he's responding to tongue-in-cheek to:
> I really like the idea of questioning whether or not ASCII should even be taught [...] Wherever in a programming curriculum, text processing/transmission/storage/presentation/encoding is taught, then it should be Unicode text
His point is that it's still worth it to learn ASCII, since the now-dominant UTF-8 has basically subsumed it.
