Improve school curriculum, introduce programming at early age, cognitive biases, philosophy, etc...

Great Debates
1

I think we should start having kids learn basic coding in elementary school, have them very familiar with computers. Maybe have them in higher grades do reverse engineering, and more advance stuff. The future is going to rely on coders and computer literacy will become more and more required whether its use of your phone, computer, how to google, whatever. We should start now and have every kid writing code by the time they reach middle school.

We also need to teach children about cognitive biases, fallacies, how to determine the truthfulness of something, how to verify their sources, how to do basic research on the internet, and how to argue or convince people of new ideas. Ideally you would have a bunch of kids applying the socratic method when talking to their parents, because a lot of parents are about as stupid as their child is intelligent. If you come home and your parents are trying to indoctrinate you into a religion you should feel inclined to ask thought provoking questions. This could have huge effects on society as a whole if we started at an early age teaching children critical skills like this.

Finally I feel like we need to teach more science. When I was in school I remember our teacher telling us the book is wrong and the test is wrong but we have to say atoms are the smallest particles in the universe. That should never happen, science books especially need to be constantly updated for new information. I feel like the way science is handled in schools is not good enough, in my experience it seems like most people don’t actually understand how gravity works for example, all they understand is an apple falls from a tree.
Right now, the average person will anthropomorphize their pet. They will claim religion is personally true to them despite it not being factually true, IE virgin birth. And people yell at each other while arguing just trying to assert their own belief instead of questioning why the other person believes what they believe. Some people actually believe wearing a item of clothing will have an effect on the outcome of a sport. People are irrational as all hell, and if we start teaching children how to think at a early age, I think it will have ripple effects throughout society starting at home when that kid goes to his parents and asks why their parent told them to do this, or why their parent told them this is true.

2

A lot of stuff like Shakespeare shouldn’t be mandatory. Stuff like credit-card debt, a rigorous understanding of personal finances would be far more handy.

3

I was taught basic coding (using BASIC and Logo) in early middle school, and that was over thirty years ago. We are teaching that, along with science, standards of evidence and the rest.

It’s true that the public education system has a lot of highs and lows, but on the whole it actually works well. By which I mean most people finish high school being able to read, write and do the basics of life. That’s not bad considering that public schools have to take EVERYONE.

Also, I’d love for you to tell us all how gravity “works”, rather than simply describing the physics of how a body such as an apple falls, which you seem to feel is insufficient. Your Nobel prize awaits.

4

Another big weakpoint - why don’t we have some kind of *national *level job match system?

The way it would work, applicants would have their records in the system. The system itself would validate those records. No resumes full of lies and half-truths, verified facts only.

This would deflate the job market and make it much more efficient.

It helps individuals because matching would be much, much faster. You would be able to quickly research what you are really worth (it would be federal law to report to this system honestly, including what businesses paid to the new hire), and companies would know what you are worth, and all job searches are global. That is, implicitly, if you indicate in your profile you are willing to accept the going rate (or very slightly under) for your profile, it’s basically a done deal.

It would be like putting a car up on autotrader where you are asking slightly under the market rate. Huge number of potential buyers, it’s going to close.

Also, discrimination would be way harder to do, because it would show up in the data blatantly. Companies have to offer an interview based on the profile, which doesn’t include age or gender. If they in turn only offer positions to specific ages or genders (or with a huge statistical skew from the groups they interviewed), the data is right there, in verified form by a third party, to take action against that company.

Obviously it also helps companies as well. I think individuals would benefit more than companies for the simple reason that if a company can’t find a person to fill a position, a company just loses potential income next quarter. If a person can’t find a company willing to hire them (and the current system is hugely luck based, it’s entirely possible to just have bad luck over the small number of actual interviews you get in a real job search, like rolling 0-5 instead of 6 on a dice 10 times in a row*) they face increasingly desperate straits depending on how long it takes.

*assuming a company hires who they like best out of 5 interview candidates, or top 20%. And you do the usual thing where you apply to a few hundred positions, get ghosted for no reason for most, and get 10 real interviews.

5

I was never taught any coding nor were there any coding classes my dad said the same thing when he was in school during the 70s or 80s they were teaching kids programming. That went away for my generation despite computers becoming more people, and low level languages being easier to understand and use (generally). At most we learned how to use a windows computer, and microsoft programs like excel. Really lackluster.

6

What does this have to do with improving the education system?

7

Want to save some lives? Put driver’s ed back in the U.S. public schools, and make it a graduation requirement (physically unable students excepted).

8

I meant well spacetime, people have a misconception about how spacetime works. Most people aren’t thinking about the universe in the way we know it to work. They just have a basic understanding of gravity working, not necessarily the knowledge that mass is bending spacetime and causing gravity. I think most people have the misconception they’re being pulled to the ground, when in reality you’re not being pushed or pulled. Theres tons of things people don’t think about and have incorrect beliefs of.

9

Why? How common is coding in the real-world?
Do you need it to be a Youtube content provider?
Do you need it to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint?
Do you need it to make a basic website using Wordpress?
Do you need it if your future lies in music, art, literature or sports?

10

Oh. Because after you get that hot, in-demand degree - one that you know from the numbers is in heavy demand - it can be surprisingly time consuming to actually get a job even then. And by “time consuming”, I mean months can go by while you are unemployed, missing out on what would have been the average entry level salary. For me, that was $70,000.

That is, I was worth 70k if employed but worthless to society up until that point because no employer had bothered to pick me up. Maybe I made mistakes and could have matched sooner but maybe it was just bad luck.

No, there were no red flags in my resume, I had a real degree from a good school, etc etc. My only flaw at that point was no experience at another company.

Anyways, making this process faster and more efficient would make school also more worth it and efficient.

11

Coding on average pays better than the average in all the things you just listed. It also is a skill expected to continue to grow in value as artificial intelligence becomes ever more capable and productive.

12

How common will coding be in a world that increasingly relies on automation, computers, and technology in general?

Coding should be as basic of a skill as reading and writing should. Even if you don’t use it in your daily life, it’s still something everyone should know to some capacity even if they only programmed back in elementary or middle school a few times. We need to set the precedent for the future.

13

When I was in high school 50 years ago I learned how to program, but not everyone did . Back then if you couldn’t code you didn’t do it. 15 years ago my daughter took CS101 in college and there was no programming at all - ftp, some html, fill in the blanks JavaScript.

I’ve been retired for 3 years and just wrote my first program to do something that my writing group would have had a hard time to do by hand. Other than that I haven’t needed it, and I love to program.

Now teaching how computers really work - at the level people use them - would be useful. And it reduce the number of requests for help to people who do understand.

14

Check out www.code.org. Lots of schools have a very small bit of coding. I’m a bit proponent of teaching some level of it early.

As for when you use it, some very simple coding (i.e., writing good equations) is necessary for using Excel. And learning to write an equation to solve a problem is a marvelous teaching moment, as it gives you instant, merciless feedback.

I’ve also taught a simple, modified version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to my students for over a decade. (The version I teach has no clear end-point, and the ability to review another player’s past games, and to choose with whom you play; as a result, the be-a-bastard strategy is AFAICT not the winning one, and I use it to teach life lessons :slight_smile: ). Introducing philosophical concepts early on is a good idea, IMO.

15

We don’t really know what lies in the future of most children so the idea is to expose them to a lot of different things via their education. It’s why most of us were in music classes at some point in our lives even if we didn’t grow up to be musicians. And there are some pretty good occupies for people who know a little coding even if they’re not programmers. Many business analyst positions for example.

16

Look, I’m a science enthusiast. I’m all for good science education, and lots of it. But I don’t imagine too many people are hampered in any way by misconceptions of spacetime.

I used to be a teacher and I found a lot of people are appalled at what others don’t know about their area of expertise*. Chemistry professors can’t believe other people don’t understand chemistry, math experts are incredulous that others don’t get math, PE teachers hate that some people aren’t athletic. But education teaches everyone a little about everything. If some of us are uncertain of why gravity pulls or pushes we’ll still get along.

  • I had an artist girlfriend once who was horrified that I didn’t know what colors mix into other colors. That was her bread and butter, but was outside my needs and experience.
17

That’s not what I’ve been hearing. Expert systems will replace a lot of current donkey-work coding jobs, is the current thinking.

18

I dunno. Is coding something that is best learned at an early age? Like language - which I understand is best learned when one is quite young?

While I do not deny the increasing prevalence of tech throughout our lives, I’m not sure how much of the school curriculum ought to be addressed to it at what age. In fact, I’m sorry to see language and music programs cut. I’d suggest offering more music and language at the earliest ages - to develop well balanced, thinking adults who are aware of their place in a diverse world.

I’m often dubious of expensive school tech programs, which seem to often chase trends rather than anticipate them, and which could be well done at (most) homes, at higher grade levels, or by other institutions such as libraries.

Drivers don’t need to know how to build/repair their cars. I dread the idea of a future in which an ability to code is necessary for more than a small percentage of persons. Fortunately, I’ll likely be dead before then.

19

Coding? What a bizarre thing to make mandatory. Why is that important? Saying it’s as important is reading is preposterous. Coding can be useful, I guess, but most people will never use it and it’s not a core skill. Why not making machining mandatory, then? Radiography? Social worker skills? Those are all in demand skills and are all skills we will need in the economy for a long, long time to come.

When you’re starting to get into things like “it’s a tragedy people don’t understand spacetime” we’re clearly into your personal hobbyhorses and not any sort of honest, objective attempt to understand what education should be about or what’s actually important for kids to learn in school. That’s almost an Onion level of absurdity. the concept of spacetime is not a critical thing for a child to know; it’s great if they do, but personally I can think of a hundred more important things, and under a certain age children have little chance of understanding it, anyway.

It’s all soooooo easy, isn’t it?

You either don’t have kids or really are not paying attention to what they’re doing in school. For one thing, they do try to teach this stuff, but it’s amazingly hard to do so; the idea of doing basic research and verifying citing sources, for instance, was introduced to my kids around age ten. That is absolutely a thing that is routinely taught in school, and has been for years now, but it’s not as easy as just saying “Verify your sources.” A ten year old does not have the full mental capacity to understand the concept of bias in sources than an adult does; it is a difficult concept to grasp at that age, when they are still working on understanding English itself. Children are in class six hours a day, and that is pretty much all they can take, so you get thirty hours a week. Thirty hours is very, very little time in which to teach them everything they need to know. You have to teach them how to frickin’ READ, how to do arithmetic, and any number of truly simple things. Knowledge and skills can’t be just dumped into a child; things have to be built up in them.

20

Serious question: How useful is basic coding for the general population nowadays? To get a computer or electronic device to do what you want it to, aren’t most people going to be able to just use software that someone else has written?

Yes. And in some places, we do.

But one obstacle may be that there are people/companies/entities that have a vested interest in people not learning these things.