Forget Foreign Languages and Music.Teach Our Kids to Code

How early is too early to begin teaching programming skills to kids? This has been a topic of discussion with educators for a while now and one educator feels the younger the child the better.

“Children aged from 5-11 have so much potential for learning about algorithms and computation that it would be a shame to wait until they are teenagers before we teach them the foundations.” That notion is still too radical for most educators.

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Removing school electives would help too. Taking psychology and speech doesn't do anything to improve my programming career either.

Ion Silverbolt said:

Removing school electives would help too. Taking psychology and speech doesn't do anything to improve my programming career either.

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I'm glad I'm not the only one cynical with the thread title and link.

Music and language are fundamental parts of what it means to be human. Coding is not.

"Anything a child learns that doesn't directly pertain to my interests is completely useless."

Isn't that fantastically right wing?

Just think of how much more GDP and tax revenue our children could generate if we stopped with all this culture, society and art bullshit and got them through the sciences and into a cubicle sooner? Our lives could be so much more beneficial to our governments and the corporations that own them if we would just get our shit together as toddlers and stop with this childhood bullshit.

Hey! you know who makes more money than programmers, have longer careers and greater job satisfaction?

Foreign language Interpretors, that's who.

Twisted Kidney said:

"Anything a child learns that doesn't directly pertain to my interests is completely useless."

Isn't that fantastically right wing?

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"Anything a young adult learns that doesn't directly pertain to our ideology is completely useless."

Isn't that fantastically left wing?

Getting rid of music and art, I can understand, since both of those are available in large quantity away from school, and formal schooling for it is hardly needful outside of those actually desiring to make it or teach it. Exchanging art/music classes for math/language classes would not harm, and prolly actually be beneficial, to our society.
Getting rid of foreign language I don't really see as a good idea. Being able to speak Spanish, (the official language of the SW lol ), is of great value in everyday life. Other common foreign languages as well. Where I live, I sometimes wish I could speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, and German, as well as English. Oh, and French, my doctor is from France, and his English is not so good. His nurse interprets for him as often as not.

Getting rid of art and music electives makes sense. Other than general stuff taught along with general courses it's pointless. You don't need a clay pottery or painting class in school.

Getting rid of foreign language courses is dumb. Even if you never learn how to fluently speak something, having an understanding of what is being spoken is actually helpful in business and life in general. If anything this stuff should be expanded. My HS had Spanish, French, and German. Only useful one considering it was in CA? Spanish. This stuff really should be expanded to include Chinese, Japanese, and maybe some other languages as well.

Coding? Trying to turn the future youth of America into an army of programmers isn't going to accomplish anything, except if successful leave a glut of programmers who can't find work and drive salaries down except for the best of the best. Maybe include some serious AP courses for this, but it certainly shouldn't be an elective starting in middle school.

As much as we need to get rid of the underwater basket weaving type of stuff in college, trying to replace it all with extremely specified degrees in another field(albeit one that is far more useful) isn't much better. Simple fact is, we're always going to need someone to dig a ditch or turn a wrench.

You could make it an elective just like these other courses. Kids who are interested can take them instead of something else.

Get rid of everything. Schools can't teach for shit anyways.

GORANKAR said:

Getting rid of music and art, I can understand, since both of those are available in large quantity away from school

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Pretty much anything can be learned away from school if your parents are willing to pay someone to teach you. The purpose of teaching basically anything in school is to give all kids a chance to experience things even if they have shitty parents who won't encourage them to do it outside of school.

Megalith said:

Get rid of everything. Schools can't teach for shit anyways.

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Of course they can't, schools are there for babysitting your kids for most the day and teaching them social skills along the way so they can be a useful member of society. The actual "education" part is a distant third.

If you attempt to force something like a computer language on the masses of children, you would have a very high failure rate, or at least a massive spike in lower GPA.

Coding requires quite a bit of thought, time and dedication. Most young kids (regardless of generation) don't have the patience or willingness to dedicate themselves to this type of thing.

Stiletto said:

"Anything a young adult learns that doesn't directly pertain to our ideology is completely useless."

Isn't that fantastically left wing?

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Absolutely, ideologies like left and right wing interfere with far too much to blindly follow.

Anyone who believes removing cultural classes from any school curriculum is good idea should be hanged for stupidity.

I guess the real question is, how did our civilization reach the point where we could have discussions about whether cultural classes were important...when, up until very recently, we didn't have those classes at all?

Almost like we didn't need them to begin with.

GORANKAR said:

Getting rid of music and art, I can understand, since both of those are available in large quantity away from school, and formal schooling for it is hardly needful outside of those actually desiring to make it or teach it. Exchanging art/music classes for math/language classes would not harm, and prolly actually be beneficial, to our society.
Getting rid of foreign language I don't really see as a good idea. Being able to speak Spanish, (the official language of the SW lol ), is of great value in everyday life. Other common foreign languages as well. Where I live, I sometimes wish I could speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, and German, as well as English. Oh, and French, my doctor is from France, and his English is not so good. His nurse interprets for him as often as not.

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Music (and to a lesser extent art) is actually incredibly important. It isn't the exposure to music (which you, as you said, you can get outside of school) that is so important so much as what learning music at a young age does to brain development... here's a hint, kids that learn music almost always have higher IQs and do better in school.

As far as foreign languages go... ditch them.

Aside from English and Mandarin (Chinese) no one needs to know anything else. French is a declining language that no longer has the world relevance it once had, and Spanish may be spoken by tons of people, but any native Spanish speaker who is important enough to be spoken to will already know English anyways... so unless you're planning to move to a third world country or be a social worker dealing with illegals in the Southwest, Spanish is pointless.

Just teach them proper Enlgish, Chinese, and yes, throw in some coding because it will be increasingly important in dealing with everything in our every day lives in the future...

And not just the understanding the computers and how they work, but the analytical thought process es that go with it... something that is already severely lacking in our growing population of brain-dead, techno-illiterate, consumer sheep... AKA the average Apple fans.

I agree, get rid of all the filler courses and put stuff that actually matters, like programming. Add more trades classes too, like electrical, plumbing, stuff that will actually matter when they grow up and own a house.

A five year old can hardly focus on putting on a pair of shoes, let alone on writing a five line function. I spent a good deal of time thinking about the question of how you teach a kid that age how to write software, but I never did end up coming up with a particularly good answer for it — not even what language to begin with. In the end, I decided to chew on the problem for a bit longer until I had a good solution or until I felt like things would fit.

It's a difficult problem. I believe Carmack waited until his first was about seven to start him down that path, and he's John fuckin' Carmack.

Some of the best programmers I know are musicians. Learning to code is easy, learning what to code is hard. It isn't that kids need to learn to code, they need grammer (code is just an extension of grammar) and math. I can teach anyone to code in 3 months, in any language, so long as they have a solid understanding of English and Math. Unfortunately, most kids have neither. If you have a solid understanding of mathematical and grammatical logic structures picking up any coding language is just a simple case of learning the syntax.

Ion Silverbolt said:

Removing school electives would help too. Taking psychology and speech doesn't do anything to improve my programming career either.

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Hmm, your logic, it is awesome. My programming classes in middle and high school were electives.

I would think that we would be better off teaching them problem solving and project management ... creative types are relatively easy to find these days but very very few of them have the skills to bring their projects to market ... given that it is far easier to outsource programming jobs to India and China at a fraction of what USA people earn I don't see programming as a stand alone skill with a strong future ... program managers who can coordinate the activities of all those people in India and China are far more important and will have better career possibilities