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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: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:01PM (2 children)
They are generally teaching specific programming skills rather than the fundamentals of it.
I had this same problem as a kind in the early 90s. The few classes on programming were mostly wrote programming exercises without either explanation of the theory of operation, order of operation, or details about the computer architecture which could interfere with implemented our expected operations. This hasn't changed almost 30 years later with the modern push to teach programming.
They are in fact trying to push out coding monkeys who won't really understand enough to become real programmers, assuming they have the drive and desire, but will act as a way to push down expected salaries by flooding the market with a glut of underperforming programmers they can use to show that supply outstrips demand when they go about hiring the qualified programmers for their jobs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday September 24 2017, @12:56PM (1 child)
I can verify this, having kids gone thru this kind of stuff, the worst stuff tends toward obscure data entry, the best stuff is pretty facile.
I'd theorize that programming is a sport. There's rules to follow and motivation and random chance plays a big but not primary role, but the distribution of untrainable uneducable skills is very non-linear. You can, and should, train up a 98% programmer to a 99% programmer at extreme effort. And a 98% programmer has a hell of a lot to learn before maxing out at 98% much less leveling up to being a 99% programmer. But your average bubba who maxes out in programming skill somewhat below fizzbuzz is never going to benefit.
Something like no matter how much you pimp ultra marathon running in the media and how closely you tie it to progressive beliefs and no matter how much you signal about it, only a vanishingly small fraction of the population is ever going to be any good at the 100 mile track event. Personally I'm not sure I could ride a bicycle 100 miles in a mere 12 hours, but apparently people run it. The ultra marathon is something people can scale down to normal experience, I hiked a couple miles yesterday and I don't think I could have made it another 95 miles, so I can think rationally about ultramarathons. The closest analogy to programming is probably low to mid level home cooking (like, based solely on following recipes) or car mechanic work, or maybe electronic hobbies, which are not culturally cool nor respected (by dominant prog culture anyway) nor is most of the population skilled at performing.
Most "everybody must program" that I've observed my kids participating in, would be analogous to an ultra marathon kids day camp where its more a theme than an activity, lets crayon some coloring books, talk about it a lot, maybe pretend to run an ultra marathon by walking one lap on the track, maybe get the kids to recite some BS they probably don't understand and will forget in a week anyway... its more about making the parents feel good when they tweet about it on facebook than doing anything for the kids.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @08:35AM
jeez the political hatred oozes out of every pore with this prick, don't it?