Jeff Atwood NY Daily News Op-Ed: Learning To Code Is Overrated

theodp writes: Responding to New York City's much-ballyhooed $81 million initiative to require all of the city's public schools to offer CS to all students, Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood has penned a guest column for the NY Daily News which cautions that learning to code isn't all it's cracked up to be. Atwood begins, "Mayor de Blasio is winning widespread praise for his recent promise that, within 10 years, all of New York City's public schoolchildren will take computer science classes. But as a career programmer who founded two successful software startups, I am deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code." Why? "If someone tells you 'coding is the new literacy' because 'computers are everywhere today,' ask them how fuel injection works. By teaching low-level coding, I worry that we are effectively teaching our children the art of automobile repair. A valuable skill — but if automobile manufacturers and engineers are doing their jobs correctly, one that shouldn't be much concern for average people, who happily use their cars as tools to get things done without ever needing to worry about rebuilding the transmission or even change the oil." Atwood adds, "There's nothing wrong with basic exposure to computer science. But it should not come at the expense of fundamental skills such as reading, writing and mathematics...I've known so many programmers who would have been much more successful in their careers if they had only been better writers, better critical thinkers, better back-of-the-envelope estimators, better communicators. And aside from success in careers, we have to ask the broader question: What kinds of people do we want children to grow up to be?"

Comments

Programming is a trade

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming is a trade. It is specific to a language and OS. I learned Integer Basic on Apple ][ Plus and that did me no good because when I got to college, the new thing was procedural programming. And then when I graduated, it became OOP. Or something - I cannot keep up with the buzzwords these days.

My point is that programming shouldn't be taught at the K-12 level. They should learn the basics - like Natural sciences. And considering the pathetic knowledge of most Americans about science, we should be concentrating there instead of creating cheap coders for Facebook and other companies who want cheap labor.

Education is about learning to learn and critical thinking not a trade like programming - and no, programming does NOT teach critical thinking or even logical thinking aside from the basic truth table. Philosophy is much more valuable than any computer science course in the grand scheme of things. And so is art and music. Programming is like auto mechanics - valuable, but not part of a well education.

Re:school sport

[TWX]

On the other hand, lots of people that play high school sports exemplify people portrayed in Bruce Springsteen's song, "Glory Days."

You make it sound like the number of seats available to teach programming are limited and very competitively sought. This is not the case. It's also true that while some entry level programming can benefit those that work in computers in-general, for those that don't make a career out of programming specifically there is an upper limit. I do LAN/WAN work and I write reasonably complex shell scripts on a regular basis, but that evolved out of my use of MS-DOS and batch files more than it did out of the C and C++ that I took in high school and college, and the scripts that I write are for myself and maybe a few others on my team, not for mass-use by the organization, and the organization actually frowns upon locally-designed things like that since there's no support if I leave.

My point is that it's great for kids to have, "Computing Essentials," that involve more than how to load a web browser or how to format a document in Microsoft Word, but there is a point where the student is going to choose some subjects over others, and proficient professional computer use and proficient administration are not the same as proficient programming.