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Seeking Coders, Tech Titans Turn To K-12 Schools
theodp writes: Politico reports on how a tech PR blitz on the importance of coding in K-12 schools has won over President Obama, who's now been dubbed the "coder-in-chief" after sitting down Monday to "write" a few lines of computer code with middle school students as part of a PR campaign for the Hour of Code, which has earned bipartisan support in Washington. From the article: "The $30 million campaign to promote computer science education has been financed by the tech industry, led by Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, with corporate contributions from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other giants. It's been a smash success: So many students opened up a free coding tutorial on Monday that the host website crashed. But the campaign has also stirred unease from some educators concerned about the growing influence of corporations in public schools. And it's raised questions about the motives of tech companies, which are sounding an alarm about the lack of computer training in American schools even as they lobby Congress for more H-1B visas to bring in foreign programmers."
The motive of tech companies is to fill the pipeline with cheap labor.
You know, it may sound like a cliche, but the world is becoming more and more reliant on computer technology. You shouldn't look at this as Microsoft looking to churn out cheap help to build Word 2025. That's just not what they're doing. Microsoft engineers aren't poorly compensated for their efforts. Their among the most highly-compensated coders out there.
These are folks who have seen computers completely transform the world around them, and they foresee this trend continuing (probably wisely). There will always be gluts here and there, or shortages here and there, but the fact is that if you want an army of super-intelligent robots cleaning our oceans, helping feed the planet, and maintaining our future space stations, then you're going to need many many more capable coders than we have now.
It's pretty transparent really. To "sell" the idea of ever higher H1b quotas, the titans like Zuckerberg have to put on a convincing act, with feigned signs of desperation about hiring. Part of that act is dog and pony stunts , astroturf campaigns, etc. Anything to create a "narrative" as they say in U.S. media where it becomes accepted wisdom that desperate measures are needed to bring on more programmers. ( As long as one doesn't look at actual numbers, such as wage changes indicating market forces responding to shortages, or anything like that )
Instead of teaching people a specific programming language then, why not teach them everything else that they should be learning in school anyway which makes a good programmer. Want a list? Okay smartass here is a list.
1. Language - More is better so that people can freely share and exchange ideas but at least English Grammar and Composition in the US.
2. Rhetoric and Logic - Logic teaches critical thinking skills as well as morality, and rhetoric further improves communication skills and rational discourse and debate (both of these things are painfully absent from academia today)
3. Math - Again more is better. Algebra and variables are the basis for simple programming language skills. This teaches the use of variables without locking someone into a restricted interface for coding in a specific language.
4. Supplement this curriculum with history economics which extends language and provides ample material for debate and discourse.
5. Further supplement the curriculum with Music theory to better learn Trig, and sciences to further their abilities with math and critical thinking.
Wow, sounds just about like classes we had in the US until the 1930s when we adopted the Prussian designed "Industrial Education system" which made people smart enough to calculate artillery range but too damn stupid to question orders doesn't it? Oh, you may not know this part of history since it's buried in piles of bureaucratic shit to hide it.. but it's there!
So why are we teaching very special bits of information and ignoring a classical education system which produced every single well known scientist in history? Still does really, because the best and brightest today go to private schools which do use the classical methods and not what public schools have become. Cui Bono. Well, large businesses that currently control everything benefit because people will be smart enough to follow instructions to make some piece of code work, but not smart enough to question why they make the code or question their economic status for doing so. Government institutions will do the same thing for the same reasons.
If what you said is true, "it's only for the children" I'll say prove it! Not one piece of public education today has been institutionalized "for the children" so why would you claim this piece is different? I believe it's just another appeal to emotion fantasy and has no connection with reality. I have history on my side, you have nothing but a delusion.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
THANK YOU.
I am absolutely disgusted by the number of people on this thread who seem to be threatened by the idea of encouraging an early interest in CS. I've been volunteering with Hour of Code this week, meaning that, unlike everyone else I've seen on this thread, I actually have some first-hand knowledge about it. I've done the exercises myself, and have seen kids using them start to "get it". How many of them will keep with it? Idunno. But if more kids get into coding because they were given the right tool or had access to a CS curriculum earlier, and they keep exploring it, and that leads to more developers on the market, if they have half as much fun getting there as I did, then that's awesome. I'm not a big enough asshole to value my own special snowflakeness over exposing kids to as many opportunities as possible, and I'm ashamed of how many people around here seem to be.
As for those who scoff and turn up their noses at drag and drop interfaces like Scratch, oh man... where to start? First, it's an INTRODUCTORY tool. Nobody is pretending that this is what professional developers do. Second, it's an excellent way to provide that introduction! Your first language is often the hardest to learn, right? Why? Because you're not just learning the language, you're learning how to think like a developer, how to break down problems and structure solutions in a particular way. Language is an implementation detail. Thus, tools like Scratch abstract it away so you're dealing with the most essential presentation possible of concepts like variables, control structures, and so on. You get that down first, then you start writing "proper" code. IMO it's a brilliant approach.