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Australia's Prime Minister Doesn't Get Why Kids Should Learn To Code
New submitter Gob Gob writes: The Prime Minister of Australia has come out and ridiculed an opposition policy aimed at teaching kids to code. In response to the leader of the Labor Party's question about whether he would commit to supporting Labor's push to have coding taught in every primary school in Australia, the Prime Minister said: "He said that he wants primary school kids to be taught coding so they can get the jobs of the future. Does he want to send them all out to work at the age of 11? Is that what he wants to do? Seriously?"
doesn't get a few things, like digging 60M tonnes of coal from central Queensland might be a) bad for the Great Barrier Reef (because of the port infrastructure needed) and b) bad for CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and C) bad for Australia because we will pay for infrastructure for these projects to go ahead. He is typical of conservative politics in Australia - I hope his great grand-children forgive him.
Yeah, because as soon as you're taught something you have to go out and get a job based on it. In another time this would have been like querying whether kids should be taught to read and write in primary school...
...this is just more evidence.
No surprise he would say something like that.
... but then, kids who are interested in making their own computer programs should be allowed to do so
And about politicians ...
Most of them only knows how to make a lot of hot air, so I am not surprised at all at that outburst from that PM of the land from down-under
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
He's the PM who wanted to scrap the National Broadband Network and thought more roads was what Australia needed. He obviously doesn't get information technology at all.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
I get that everyone wants to teach kids to do what they like because they think they are the best version of human and obviously it is best for humanity if your life template is copied as much as possible, but I don't get why it is so obvious to everyone that getting everyone to code is so beneficial.
There is a LOT to life, and not everyone needs to be doing the same things, or is even capable or willing to do those things. Everyone has different strengths and limitations. Even if you go on about how learning to code teaches a lot of associated skills, those same skills can be learned many other ways.
I dunno, it just feels like all this "TEACH ALL KIDZ TO CODE, LOL" going around is a bunch of mutual masturbation and self-fellatio.
And rightly so! I've never heard anyone insist we should teach kids how to do basic plumbing or install a new light switch. Seeding tomatoes perhaps?
Teach kida to code? We need more socially inept morons on the planet or something?
STOP THE PRESSES! Talk about nothing else! It is IMPOSSIBLE to talk and think about more than ONE problem at a time! Always and only focus on the most important issue ever!
Like adware.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
that thousands of little script kiddies are already toiling away in sweat shops?
I mostly agree with him.
I (and I'm sure MANY of us!) didn't learn any programming skills formally until college (and some not even there). I learned basic skills on my own because I thought it was fun, learned more formally in college, and really only made the decision to go into software engineering soon before graduation.
I just think kids are better off learning more general areas - math, physics, chemistry, writing/literature, social sciences, economics, and BASIC (pun intended) computer science/programming. Leave the specialization to a time where they know what that even means.
Learning to code is like learning a second language. It teaches you to think in the mindspace of the computer, so to speak... that is, the kids are learning about logic, arithmetic, flow control, and other such concepts. Once you get the basics down, learning other languages becomes much easier. Even if those kids don't become programmers, the familiarity they get with computers and the higher lessons learned should still be worthwhile.
Those of us who program for a living nowadays probably started programming on our own when we were younger. My first lessons were self-taught, thanks to an Apple II I had access to, as well as a book that taught AppleBASIC (and one designed for kids, of all things - I wish I could find that book somewhere). Later in college, I decided I wanted to become a programmer, and picked up Pascal, C, and C++ quite easily, thanks to my earlier lessons in BASIC.
As long as the curriculum is solid, this seems like a positive thing. I wonder if it's difficult to find qualified instructors, though?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
We need to start seeing programming languages as a modern replacement of the semantics of mathematics, rather than something separate. Mathematics is just programming expressed in the form of symbols. Take calculus for example, the equations describe dynamic systems and the symbols used are type of functions or methods. Programming is thus calculus and a program is a formal math proof. Many people will have issues with Math, but not demonstrate the same issues when it comes to code. Children can be offered a choice between math and programming, but still learn the same set of skills. I personally have issues with understanding and working with the traditional presentation of math equations, but this vanishes when I express those equations in code to such an extent that I'd have the same capability as someone with a Masters or PhD in mathematics. Some people are just wired differently and we need to understand that a one-size-fits-all approach to learning does not gel with how the brain works.
Tony Abbot doesn't understand anything that isn't making him and his mates a lot of dosh RIGHT NOW!
It turns out under his own government's policy kids are already being taught to code, and he wasn't aware of this, so naturally went o the attack. Which seems to be the main talent of this guy.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
It's good to introduce children things they're likely to encounter.
In my childhood I was taught (simple) woodworking, music (playing flute), theater (acting), sewing, swimming, etc.
Not solely for perspective jobs, just for getting an idea what the world turns
He is an idiot. Total numbskull. He's a great leader since everything he says can be guaranteed to be stupid. You know where you are with Abbott and so does the rest of the world. No worries Tony. You can be titular head of whatever you want to be, just ignore all the stuff going around you and everything will be ok.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Do we want the kids to be perfecty prepared to build 1990's technology? Remember, you are reading this on a WEB PAGE. Web pages were not even invented until the mid-1990's.
I sympathize with those who want kids to be prepared. But we used to call computer technology, and what we should today call cell phone technology, is changing so fast that almost anything you learned in school will be obsolete before you can get a job using it.
For example, in college I learned FORTRAN and CDC 6400 assembler language. My first computer job I worked in RPG (Report Program Generator) and IBM 360 assembler language. I had the mental focus, and the learned disrespect for computers, but the actual coding learned was history. Ten years later we gave up on punched cards. What will today's programmer do when a speaking AI robot creates custom-made apps?
I have been programming for forty-five years. Teaching kids how to program is like learning to read Latin - historically interesting, but in the market place completely useless.
There is no point in teaching coding skills to anyone who doesn't care about it. I've run into far too many people in this industry who only did it because somebody thought it would be lucrative.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The summary misses the main point of the story. Tony Abbott ridiculed the concept of teaching children to program in response to a question by the opposition leader when his own government of which he is the leader already has a policy in place to fund teaching children to program (although not to make it compulsory).
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
And yet another incredibly biased news post... that says a lot of the poster. I agree with that prime minister. Not everyone should learn to code. We really don't need more mediocre developers.
Sorry - but writing code is no great secret: all you need to be is smart. Reading and basic math skills will go much further to achieving the goal of preparing kids for their future cube bound existence.
I will also point out that there are way to many programmers with no expertise outside of programming. One trick ponies.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Why are be so pressing on kids to learn coding? If a kid wants to learn coding, they'll learn coding, if they don't want to, they won't. If we start forcing kids to learn computer programming it will be no better then when we force kids to take Shakespeare, Drama, History or Art. Don't make kids learn anything they aren't interested in, because when you do that, they'll never give it a real shot.
Teach kids how to read, how to reason, how to make music, how to speak a second language. Expose them to various fields of science such as astronomy and oceanography. Coding is a tool they can pick up later.
So maybe we should stop kids from learning how to play a recorder in school, because all of them will not become musicians. Stop them from learning math, because they will not all become mathematicians. Physics, biology, the list goes on. Teach them only how to be a worker bee.
If I wanted to run a dictatorship from within a nominally democratic political system, "proles voting idiots into power without understanding what those idiots' policies will do to them" is /exactly/ the voting bloc I'd want to target. And grow.
Some would argue that Common Core and related nonsense is precisely doing that - training kids only to be "testing bees". And some would argue that the social attitudes forced on kids by school district policies (zero tolerance, for example) are training kids to be drooling government slaves. #justsayin.
I have to say I've started thinking about computers differently. It feels like it's made learning about new things easier, especially different programming laungages or whatever complex system you happen to come across.
But I think if you hate coding in the first place, or just aren't into it or won't even go into IT, you're wasting your time and energy.
Teaching coding to elementary/primary school children may not be helpful. A good portion of them may not yet grasp the perquisites necessary to understand logic for conditionals. If there are more crucial learning deficits like reading or arithmetic, then it's better to focus on them first.
Another subject that will be 100% useless for 99% of students.
Remember when you had to know the periodic table by heart. Needed it for test and never thought about it again for the next 20 years.
There is more and more information to learn. Maybe we should rethink how schools work in general. Look for children with talents in certain areas and base the curriculum on that.
Of course this violates bullshit rule number 1 which states that "everybody is the same" ....
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
And then can avoid it if it doesn't appeal...
About 30% of Australian high school age kids are in work training or just straight on work, rather than full time students, and are exiting with not much more than middle school level language and maths skills in a US context. So that PM Abbott isn't keen on coding classes isn't a huge surprise.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I agree that understanding computers is important, but there is much more to the "computing landscape" that programming. Remember that to a hammer (i.e., programmer), everything looks like a nail (i.e., a program). Machine learning is the new paradigm, and there is no programming. IBM's "True North" chip is a neural network chip - not a programmable CPU. In 20 years (maybe sooner) no human will be programming. So we should not be telling kids that being a programmer is a "career".
"proles voting idiots into power without understanding what those idiots' policies will do to them" is what people always think about the people voting for one of the other sides though.
True enough. But I'm cynical enough to believe that pretty much everybody who's trying to get elected also believes that about their own voting bloc; they're just sheep to be herded or cajoled into the right voting pen.
I'm unconvinced by all of these initiatives to teach programming to kids. And I say this as the father of a teen who is already a pretty darned good programmer - precisely because I see how unusual it is.
Coding is fun stuff, but really, what's important here is the ability to create models (abstraction) and the ability to do structured problem solving. If you teach these skills with coding, you introduce a lot of overhead in the form of language syntax, compilation problems, libraries, IDEs, and other stuff. For kids who like messing with computers, that's fine, but for everyone else, it just adds a bunch of irrelevant sources of frustration.
You would be better off omitting the overhead and concentrating on the modelling and the problem solving. Make them enjoyable, by including plenty of riddles, logic puzzles and the like. For most kids, that will be a lot more fun than fighting with syntax errors.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Sigh... the Honor..... wait.... Prime Minister Tony Abbott is seemingly so used to bickering and working against anything offered by his political "counterparts" in government that he likely goes into an auto just say no mode and is at the same time possibly showing off a subconscious fear that a tech savy population is going to shred an upcoming techno tyrrany to pieces once the kids develop enough critical thinking abilities rendering the government unable to control every thought and behaviour of the population... let true education begin that enables creation rather than just consumption of centralized controlled technology and software. A clear FAIL for the PM
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
No, not unless he's had it slipped under the table to him recently.
When the government he was in some years ago lost power he had to take a pay cut which he could not afford so he took a mortgage out on his house to support his lifestyle.
Also he worked as journalist and never a lawyer (or economist) despite his education along those lines when he was one of those "perpetual undergraduate student" political types that infest Universities for many years at a time stirring up trouble.
You are probably thinking of Malcolm Turnbull who owns, or used to own, a large chunk of an ISP, practiced as a lawyer and who would understand why kids should know at least a little bit about coding.
that once people is exposed to basic logic, reasoning and critical thinking as a child... It becomes very hard for imbeciles to rule them once adults.
This is the real issue this clown fears.
Kids don't need to be taught to code - not because they're too young to learn (I was coding since I was maybe 10 years old?) but because there's already a glut of coders in the workforce. The shortage was a now well-understood hoax made by a few US tech companies who employ coders.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm so glad I got the opportunity to learn to code in primary school. It was the volunteer school music teacher who took extra time to show me, and it wasn't too long before we had vector graphics flying around the screen in 6502 assembly.
This was one of the things that kept me out of trouble. I already had a different race and family background to the other kids. On top of that was smart enough to feel a bit alienated, but not so smart to be singled out as obviously gifted. Coding gave me a chance to feel stimulated, challenged, explore other ideas. And later it spurred me on to work harder at maths and science because I wanted to be able to apply those subjects in my coding (graphics and sound). So, not every kid will go on to be an amazing coder, but for some it will open doors.
Think of it like school sport. While not all go on to be elite athletes, almost all kids in first world countries get the opportunity to play sports and participate in physical exercise at school. I was pretty lousy at sports, but, thanks to that early start to this day still have an interest in staying as fit and healthy as possible, and love the chance to get outside an enjoy nature.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Like programming, I try to address on issue at a time instead of writing one giant spaghetti function that does it all.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I feel kids should at least be familiar with coding. Learning how computers execute instructions and do what they do is akin to learning about how oxygen combines with fuel in combustion in a science class, or how cells divide in a biology class.
They don't have to know extreme detail, just have a basic idea of how the world works. And in today's world that includes computers.
The language doesn't even matter. Even old-school BASIC is a good language to use for the class, because it's easy to understand and the results are instant. Just enter some lines and type RUN.
It's not like we have to each the kids all about complex APIs, GUI programming, networking and so on. Just teach them enough to get rid of the feeling that the computer is a "magic box" that they have no idea how it works.
Coding and the profession "programmer" is a special task, which needs be aware of computing and thinking in a very logical way. Building furniture, like a chair or a table requires also to become a "cabinetmaker". But school is about learning general knowledge, as a foundation for life and further learning in an apprenticeship or studies. Like teaching childern to handle a saw, hammer and pliers, children should learn to unterstand computers in general and how to handle (personal) data, maybe also touch-typing.
Touch typing is anyway a good example, it is much more needed than coding. As an example in germany touch-typing is teached on Hauptschule (prepares for a apprenticeship in industry or craft), on Realschule (prepares for a apprenticeship in an office, industry or craft) but not on the Gymnasium (prepares for a apprenticeship and studying at university).
So if your kid mastered the "ABI" on a Gymnasium, it learned:
Goethe, Schiller, Kafka *ouch* and so on: Yes
Tax, Social Insurance, Bank Transfers: No
Well. I learned about Kafka also on Realschule...but I learned for life.
Instead of teaching kids to code lets teach them formal logic, data organization, process management, and systems analysis. All those skills are useful in daily life yet learning how to code is a complete waste of time.
When I was young there were no computers. I learned about internal combustion engines. I learned about electricity and electronics. I learned to make things of wood and metal. I enjoyed erector and chemistry sets. All of these things benefit me 60 years later. None of them were taught in my school.
Much later I learned to program in 6 languages (none of which are used today), again without any school help. I created databases for business, educational software, and taught and wrote articles about the industry.
Few of my contemporaries cared for such a broad understanding of practical things, but almost all had access to this knowledge. None of it required government requirements or school. Today there are vastly more opportunities for young people to learn whatever might interest them and school is not required.
Reading and arithmetic are essential to all children. Arithmetic can include logic, though I've never seen it done in public schools. Children need preparation for life- money management, social norms, and the fading understanding of geography, history, economics, other cultures etc. They need some political understanding, not just approved government propaganda but the reality of government & corporate interaction. They need enough chemistry and biology to prepare them for family health management as adults. Where does programming fit in to these requirements?
There is a current trend to confuse education with job training. This needs to stop. Education prepares children to be responsible citizens of the world. Job training can wait until junior college.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I'm in the same boat as you. I just bought my kids a book on coding Minecraft mods. I am going to teach them because they were asking about it and it is something I am capable of doing with them that may help them in some way some day. But it is no different then a mechanic working with his kid to change an intake manifold on an engine in a muscle car. I don't see why all kids need to learn how to do it. In fact, I question if there will be any jobs that go remotely close to programming by the time they are working. It will all me clicking on buttons in the cloud.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Kidz doo knot kneed to no howe to spel or ad upp untill thay leev skool. Just teech themm the bassix att th aage of ateteen wen thay wont two gett ah jobb.
return 0; }
As a developer myself, I don't think it's a good idea to make kids learn how to code.. Make them interested and let them do it at home if they want to.. The kids are already burdened with so many more classes these days, why even add more if they can't f-ing read/write or calculate correctly..
So I too see no reason why they should have to study coding at school..
...as over 50% of people in one Australian state, Tasmania, are.
Teaching young kids to code is a great idea that I have already implemented, but it cannot work while in some regions kids are failing to pick up even basic maths. http://www.abc.net.au/radionat...
All this partisan political mania is hiding bigger issues that need to be addressed first.
Kids shouldn't be taught to read either, or by the age of 11 they could read the stupid things Abbott says. They shouldn't be taught arithmetic, or by the age of 11 they could add up the number of times he says stupid things. Let's just march boldly backwards into the future.
You need to work on your reactions in such situations instead of an instant desire to shoot the messenger in such an insulting way.
I'm glad someone here sees the outrage. Got a lot of AC's telling me I'm whining.
I don't know, I've been on this website for a long long time, packaging and slinging adware is BAD NEWS folks.
It's currently on the firehose. Vote it up!
You think Slashdot packaging adware on a GPL application they don't own or haven't contributed to isn't probably the most important story Slashdot readers would like to know about?
Anonymous Coward #49797227, I've been around here a long time. You must be new and enjoy your iPhone's clean interface and easy access to Plants Vs Zombies, but some of us here give a damn about software freedom.
I used book-learning to teach myself programming before I was ten. This had hugely negative impacts for my University degree over a decade later. Starting early will also expose 'natural talent' and make it easier to give them guidance and support (in the example that the child may never otherwise have access to computing facilities that would allow them to learn this, although that is becoming far less common).
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."