I was formally taught to program in teaching programming languages (it was earlier than Java, but had it been available, Java would likely have been used in place). The reason for this is simple -- you don't really want your students who are learning many new concepts at the same time, and esp. when you want to emphasize high-level concepts to be stuck debugging memory issues and getting overloaded by that in the process.
So we were expected to learn the more tricky languages by ourselves later on in the program. We weren't spoon-fed C or assembler or whatever, and still had to program in it. You should expect to encounter similar situations in the field.
C++ is a big, tough language, which can be used in a number of different styles. You find experienced, deeply knowledgeable "language lawyers" in the field. I think that if you're really serious about learning it at a deep level, then you might have to give it a good go through self-study, and not entirely rely on whatever subset of the language you can learn in class.
Perhaps I'm wrong though and learning C++ in a class will give you a strong education. I interviewed and tested a person who taught C++ in a university once, and I found him lacking, not only in depth, but in some important fundamentals. This colours my view obviously.
