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Jason Bradbury Believes Coding Lessons In Schools Are a Waste of Time (trustedreviews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Famous TV personality Jason Bradbury, who hosts The Gadget Show, believes that the UK government is wasting its time trying to teach kids learn how to code. In a recent interview, he said, 'My kids won't need to code because soon computers will just code for them. I fundamentally disagree with the government initiatives to get my kids coding. It's a complete waste of time. Soon startups will just be run by really creative people -- there won't be a coder with bad social skills stood on the stage. The future will just be about being creative. This is why we need to challenge STEM and introduce an art component and rename it STEAM -- science, technology, engineering, art and maths."
Stop This Everybody Must...stuff
It's not that everybody must, it's that most should.
A lot of people are really unfathomably stupid. And they could increase their intelligence by probably an order of magnitude if they internalized a few important additional mental patterns. One of those is if-then statements.
If A then B. If C then not D. Just the idea of reacting intelligently, of planning ahead a little bit and choosing an action based on what happens, rather than intuiting your way through life.
Of course almost nobody is going to do that all the time, and that's good because habits and ignorance save a lot of time and can make life much more practical. But people should have the chance to learn.
I especially disagree with his opinion about art. I could see a practical art, maybe, but most of the art scene in big cities sucks. I have had a lot of exposure to it because my sister is really into it (and is one of said artists.) I have attended the shows and other stuff she hosts, and am around lots of other artists that come to these things, and one thing I've observed is that basically nobody comes to these artsy events/shows unless they themselves are an artist, and even then they're mostly just there to support their fellow artists. While the later is applaudable I guess, I can't help but observe that this business model just doesn't work very well, and explains why most of them are poor.
Before I say what comes next, I need to draw an analogy. Presently most lawyers are grossly underemployed, and there's a simple reason for this: There's an economic need for about 7,000 new lawyers per year, yet our universities are pumping out 40,000 new lawyers per year.
Under the same vein, and while I don't have any numbers to show, I suspect that universities are also pushing out too many new arts (and liberal arts) graduates per year. That is, we have more professional artists than there's an actual demand for. Another thing I've observed is that if you aren't very obviously talented early on in life, then a college probably isn't going to change that. Thus I think adding "arts" in the same vein as STEM careers is probably not a good idea.
As for his prediction of the future, let's wait and see what exactly AI can code before we start asking a lot of new college graduates (presumably with their big student loans) to become the founders of new tech startups and go even further into debt.