The push to generate millions of new coders has largely been generated by the tech industry itself. For instance here are the folks behind code.org. And, like major players in every other capitalist industry segment, they spend millions of dollars lobbying politicians and influencing the media, in an attempt to convince people that this is some kind of benevolent pursuit. There are already many computer science graduates that do not find work in their chosen field, and the idea that a virtually unlimited number of new positions will be created is nonsense. Like any other business they are advocating for something that improves their bottom line - action that keeps down wages.
And that scenario has nothing at all to do with people acting under pressure in a crisis situation? A highly trained scientist could panic in that situation and do the wrong thing.
Trying to be as kind as possible here… You could do a better job of taking other peoples’ point of view. I mentioned earlier that experts are often bad at this. They forget what it’s like to be a beginner, and how it feels to not be skilled or knowledgeable. I fly airplanes for a living, and you’d be amazed how pilots will turn on each other when someone makes a mistake. Which we do - highly trained people still make mistakes.
All this to say, I’m all for education and we agree on that. But your ideas lack perspective.
Maybe that’s also something schools should do a better job of teaching.
Not sure how, exactly, but it might involve reading more literature.
My son is in fifth grade in a Baltimore City public school, and he has had coding more than once since kindergarten. The news going around today is that Ohio will prevent a teacher from failing a kid’s flat earther paper, if the kid says “But my religion”. The thing about the US is that we don’t have an education system, we have 100s of education systems. Some are better than others, and anytime we try to come up with a national standard, people lose their minds and complain about it. Common Core was an attempt to address our lack of a national curriculum, and people hate it, though most criticism you see about it have nothing to do with it. Of the complaints that were actually about common core, one that I saw over and over was people freaking out about how arithmetic was being taught differently. Parents saying that math shouldn’t change, that’s not the way I learned to add, etc. It didn’t seem to matter that experts on education had developed new methods (or adapted old methods) of teaching math, and that these new methods were objectively better than the methods we learned when we were kids.
This isn’t even the first time that methodology in math education has changed. I’m 45, when I was in elementary school you’d see newspaper comics about how mystifying the “New Math” was. Usually from hacks, but even Calvin & Hobbes has a strip about it. Science marches on, and we get better about educating our kids. The real threat to education is that religious extremists and nationalist morons have super large impact on our curriculum. Religious extremists don’t want exceptions for their kids, they want exceptions so that they can sneakily try to convert your kids and my kid. Nationalist want happy stories about willing workers and white heroes so that they can perpetuate white supremacy.
You wanna prepare kids for the future? Teach Russian and Chinese in schools instead of European languages.
Hilarious, when I was in school a science teacher told a class of students that weren’t planning to take four years of science (we only needed two to graduate), “Better learn Japanese.”
This would have been the 1989/90 school year, and we had Japanese students at our school.
In the language wars, English has already won. And why would anyone learn Russian? I’m surprised Russians bother to learn it.
You act as if reading and writing stops when the bell rings. Guess what? That kid, is probably going home to play the legend of zelda and is going to read multiple books worth of information within a few days. It’s the structure that we present information and method that we teach them is the problem. We sit there begging kids to speak for a couple years of then spend the rest of their childhood yelling at them to shut up and sit still.
Learning to code isn’t going to help him do either of those things.
Which is kind of the point - reading and writing don’t stop when the bell rings. So, probably, time spent on learning reading and writing are going to be more useful than time spent on something else.
Regards,
Shodan
This is the classic list that poeple who no Little about education always make to fell superior. Whereas, definitely, we should change how and what we teach, these lists -which sound like great stuff_ are things that the autor would’ve wanted.
Why? How many people need to know coding?
How many periods a week? How long until they get tired of coding?
Who’s is going to teach “reverse engineering”? How is it useful for 95% of the jobs they will have? Doing a bit of that, as part of a full curriculum sounds good, but not a course.
Most people successfully use very complicated technology without knowing, or needing to know, how it works.
Every good school in the world teaches that.
Source for that claim? Kids tend to have their parents IQ. The Socratic method is kinda useless in power-imbalance circumstances.
Kids have rebelled against their parents religion for ever. Also, I teach my kids my values, you teach your kids your values.
Yup, because teenagers love to talk about the flavors of quarks. Books always have mistakes, that’s why us teachers tell them, this part is wrong or may be biased.
You need better teachers, then. Make education a socially and economically good profession.
MY wife’s a doctor with two specialities and she anthropomiphizes the fuck out of her stupid cats.
Unless you go to a religious school, I don’t think that the Virgin Birth is going to come up on a test. Also, nobody thinks that it’s a sicentifically demostragle thing.
Not limited to religious people, not even remotely.
You don’t know people, do you? If your parents tell you to do something, you do (almost always) do it, period, that’s it. Thats’ how families work.
I remember being taught how to extinguish different kinds of fires in about 4th grade. It was one of those “learn a bit of science at the same time” moments. I think there are two schools of thought I’ve come across with teachers. One is to teach specialized skills because students might need them some day. I’m putting coding in that category. The other is to include only taste of a variety of skills, just so the student has an impression of what the specialists are doing, even though mostly they won’t be doing it themselves.
I think Excel (or google’s version or open office) should be the backbone of a lot of courses. I would have killed to have it in physics class, for example. For me it hits the sweet spot of being fairly easy to pick up, useful, and still providing support for specialist and advanced skills if needed*.
Frankly, I get depressed when I see learning systems taking over for some tasks. People have spent twenty, thirty, fourty years trying write specific algorithms to to tell a dog from a cat. Now you start with an AI that is only programmed to learn, and teach it what a cat and a dog is, the same as you would a child. It’s like steam ships taking over from sailing ships.
Part of the difficulty in designing education is any choice involves values: what one values in life in and society, what one thinks the future will be and what it should be, ideas about authority and obedience and resistance to same, and the list goes on. Not to put too fine a point on it, your idea that we should equip people to work, be patriotic, and make smart shopping choices looks to the next person like you want to turn out drones, cannon fodder, and vacuous consumers…and etc. As for me, I think kids should be trained in self defence and scaling violence, first aid, peaceful conflict resolution, piano, basic agriculture and tool use, and how to organize with others who have different viewpoints to accomplish common goals. That is, smart rebels who will resist authority and figure out how to build a world they’d live to live in. Who you might see as terrorist layabouts, wreckers, and parasites. Now, we each take our plans to the school board…
Agreed
Teaching self defence is useless unless you’re ready to really hurt your students. Most “self defence” activities make things more dangerous because you think you have an ability you don’t.
Good idea, most kids will hate it, though.
That’s really hard to teach, but critical thinking skills are always good.
,
Music, yes.
This will make all other “when will I need to do this” questions pale in comparison.
Offer shop clases, but most will detest it.
Schools do that, but you can’t teach it as a subject.
You can’t teach teach rebelliousness in an orderly fashion to teens.
I confess I was, and am, not entirely serious, but:
You can easily teach kids how to break fingers, gouge, bite, punch, and kick, and if everyone knows everyone can do that, bullying would cease instantly. At least if we follow the logic of some of those opposed to gun control. And if you’re gong to teach all that, many will be keen to learn first aid. The basic stuff is pretty simple; Boy Scouts and Girl Guides used to be taught it all the time.
Anyone who has unbroken fingers can then sign up for piano lessons.
You absolutely can teach teens to rebel in an organized fashion, and teach people in actual classes to figure out how to work together. That doesn’t mean they won’t find other ways to be jackasses. This site has some ideas and there are lots more like it
As for farming, one good meteor strike (and feel free to insert other disaster scenarios here) and a whole lot of us are going to be wishing we knew how to grow rutabagas.
And this discussion of “authority and obedience and resistance to same” reminds me of a relatively recent thread on Law vs Chaos in D&D/Pathfinder.
It seems to me that “Teach kids to fit in, respect authority, and be a productive member of society” is the kind of viewpoint a Lawful individual (in the RPG alignment sense) would espouse, while “Teach kids to rebel and question/resist authority” is the viewpoint of a Chaotic alignment.
I’m guessing Dungeons and Dragons here? It’s not my first stop for political philosophy, but perhaps 8 should fix that. There is a different between a rebel without a cause/clue and principled resistance to authority, by which I mean someone with the institutional power to compel others to do what they are told. As Bakunin put it, one might respect the “authority” of the bootmaker on the matter of boots if by that you mean consider their advice seriously and then do what you think best. That’s a lot different from the chaos imposed by the authority who says, do what I tell you and pretend to like it, or else.
TBH I think people here are thinking we should train everyone to be software developers or teaching coding as an otherwise “job-ready” skill like they’re going to be programming data analysis or something.
Personally, I think coding is just a useful drop in for some forms of later high school math. For instance, a very large portion of high school math is spent on conics which are just… not very useful? I’m in a math heavy field and I think the last time I used quadratics was in a quadratic polynomial kernel which still didn’t use 99% of the skills (it’s basically just distributing) and is a super niche application that even most people doing modern Machine Learning work won’t rub up against.
Coding also just makes more things make so much more sense than what they did when I was in high school. For instance the notion of domain, range, pre-image, etc seemed like a huge, absurd waste of time in high school to me because it was like “oh no if you have a function 1/x then the domain doesn’t include 0!!!” which like… cool but also why are we spending 2 weeks learning all this framework to label things all “all numbers except 3 of them”.
That’s even a more niche thing unelss you’re doing like… real analysis or abstract algebra or something…
…
Unless you work it into coding. If I have a function
fn stringify(i: uint32) -> String
Then the domain is any (computer representable, 32-bit) nonnegative integer, the codomain is the set of Strings, and the range is the set of all Strings which contain decimal digits (i.e. [0-9]+ in regex). Or the inverse
fn parse_string(s: String) -> uint32 {
}
Whose descriptors are a bit more tight (since technically you can input any string but the function is undefined). Honestly a good deal of functional programming, while less common in ~the software industry~ would be a great few units for a high school math course because the pure functional nature makes it easy to reason about type inputs and outputs.
- not strictly accurate since there’s a 1:1 mapping so it’s all strings that looks like a 32-bit unsigned integer, but for high school purposes saying [0,infinity) -> “[0-9]+” is probably sufficient.
Anyway, for fallacies. We had a few units on those in high school and I didn’t find them particularly useful. In fact, I think they’re responsible for the way a lot of ways people misuse fallacies now. And honestly contributed to some piss-poor literature analysis too. For instance, if you look at Animal Farms sparknotes stuff it talks about how the narrator saying if Napoleon hadn’t left the farm it would have been better is an example of the “hypothesis contrary to fact” fallacy which is like…
Orwell was a leftist (varying between socialist and anarchist depending on where he was in life), Animal Farm is transparently about the Russian Revolution in particular and socialist revolutions in general. Orwell is plainly saying “Trotsky left for the capitalism world because somehow even Capitalism is better than Stalinism, but if Trotsky had stayed and led Soviet Russia then maybe things would’ve been okay.” Which like… is a historical fact you can argue about, I disagree Trotsky would’ve somehow saved the Soviet model, but merely calling it “hypothesis contrary to fact” both obscures the actual allusion the book is making and ignores the fact that this is an educated opinion that Orwell was arguing for (through the text of Animal Farm itself), not simply a statement that “if things were different they’d be different”.
IMO High School fallacy stuff also fails to properly delineate between the context where fallacies matter, and the distinction between formal/deductive fallacies and inductive fallacies. Deductive fallacies rarely work in real life arguments (since they only really apply to syllogisms where logic is axiomatic and follows a system of defined rules), and inductive fallacies are only contextually fallacies. For instance appeal to expert authority is only a fallacy when the expert is irrelevant in an inductive context, but is straight up wrong in a deductive context where expertise does and can not override syllogistic rules “my professor said A and not A is true” is not valid boolean logic.
Now, exposing kids to this is useful, I certainly wish I had been mentally as mature as I was now in high school English because analyzing works, their biases, logical fallacies, and thematic suggestions (death of the author or not) makes more sense to me now, but there is a certain level where high school English sorta stuff takes a weird pseudo-rote tack to it where it asserts works mean very specific things, or use things to “illustrate” certain concepts sans wider context that makes the lessons very prone to fallacious use in real practice in actual arguments or media engagement.
Public schools are trimming arts and PE from their curriculum. I say we go back to making mandatory before we add something else.
I am OK with an introductory coding course as an elective in middle school. Or an elementary school offering coding lessons for afterschool enrichment (my school did this with folk dancing, of all things). I don’t see any reason to make this mandatory, though.
I began programming in COBOL a loooooong time ago. I went bonkers from being on call-out and transferred to a client department where I did adhoc reporting using SAS. I loved it. But it’s not for everybody. We’d often hire contractors to fill in, and, damn, some of the people who called themselves “programmers.” Sheesh. One guy was a trucker who had some physical issue that prevented him driving a truck anymore so he went to DeVry and was now a “programmer.” He understood the basics of SAS coding, but he couldn’t think his way through developing workable code to save his life. It’s not for everybody. Even the people who thought they’d be good at it had a wash-out rate of at least 50% in the contractors we went through over the years.
So, yeah, as monstro says, offer it as an elective. Kids’ll figure out if it’s for them, and if it’s not? No biggie. You don’t really need it to be an educated, successful citizen.
My proposal isn’t adding another core class that’s programming so much as using coding as a tool/unit to replace or supplement existing math units that may be poorly motivated or not broadly useful (except for the broad use of teaching kids to solve problems and do mathematical thinking).