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The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.
This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn't actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won't make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that's precisely the point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @11:16PM (1 child)
They're not really comparable, and we have enough of that already. It's entirely possible for anyone to self-educate and learn computer science if they have the aptitude for it, and many do.
The 'Everybody has to go to college'/'Everybody has to be certified' trends are, in general, unjust and counterproductive. Employers should be vetting candidates better in the fact place and not relying on degrees and certifications. Let's stop discriminating against people who know what they're doing just because they don't have some piece of paper, are 'overqualified', are too old, and so on.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday September 25 2017, @12:38AM
Certification is certainly lousy in tech. Does anybody even get certs any more? I got an A+ must have been 15 years ago, but I don't think I've ever had a job using those (specific) skills. Never bothered wasting time and money with another cert.
Employers still need some way to know who knows what they're doing. I hear you. It still floors me that there are all kinds of people running around with 4 year degrees that can't even write fizz buzz! I don't have a 4-year degree personally, but I understand that I'm expected to claim an associate's degree for the 2-year technical school I dual enrolled in during high school. It was me and another guy there who were beyond the teacher, so he let us do whatever the fuck we wanted to do for the last semester. We wound up studying for and acing the AP computer science AB exam.
I guess I don't have any concrete ideas other than this professional association would be directed by people who know what they're doing.
Though perhaps it is a pipe dream. Right now industry has too much of a stranglehold on the art to the point that I feel nobody in the general public recognizes that there is an art involved in tech (one of those “useful” arts). The general public sees it as yet another meaningless skill set that serves no other purpose than getting a paycheck.
Perhaps we should attempt to better define the nature of this art?