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Apple CEO Tim Cook: I'd Require All Children To Start Coding In 4th Grade (thehill.com)
This week Apple CEO Tim Cook argued at Startup Fest Europe that coding should be a 'second language' taught to all children. theodp shares two quotes from a YouTube video. "We fundamentally believe that coding is a language and that just like other languages are required in school, coding should be required in school," Cook stated. "I do think coding is as important-- if not more important -- as the second language that most people learn in today's world," Cook later added... "I would go in and make coding a requirement starting at the fourth or fifth grade, and I would build on that year after year after year...I think we're doing our kids a disservice if we're not teaching them and introducing them in that way."
Meanwhile, The Hill reported this week that The Computer Science Education Coalition -- which includes Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and dozens of other companies -- hired a fourth "advocacy firm" that specializes in "mobilizing groups of people to influence outcomes...to help convince policymakers to provide money to computer science education for grades K-12," and they're seeking an initial investment of $250 million. I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about government funding of grade school coding classes.
Meanwhile, The Hill reported this week that The Computer Science Education Coalition -- which includes Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and dozens of other companies -- hired a fourth "advocacy firm" that specializes in "mobilizing groups of people to influence outcomes...to help convince policymakers to provide money to computer science education for grades K-12," and they're seeking an initial investment of $250 million. I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about government funding of grade school coding classes.
Has offshore labor gotten too expensive for Apple?
I was to worried about getting beat day to day to worry about coding or math at school. I learned those away from school so I didn't have to worry about societies idiot shit.
I'd actually argue that we need a hell of a lot more humanities in our schools... learning about how to treat each other, what makes a good life, how to find purpose, learning from history, how to work together to create a society that works for everyone (not just an efficient, technocratic one where everyone who matters is staring at their laptop, and everyone else is condemned to minimum-wage servitude).
Tech-inclined kids will find coding on their own -- I was writing QBASIC in 4th grade -- but it seems kids these days know far too little about history, government, and sometimes even basic civility, compared to the past.
Then again, maybe I'm just getting old and crochety -- and old people have been complaining about kids for millenia.
The fuck does he think he is "requiring" something like that? I'll teach my kids whatever the fuck i want.
How about getting rid of H1B's with that
Troubleshooting. Everyone uses it at some point eventually. It's a pure and yet practical form of critical thinking. Teaching coding? Most people won't get much out of it I think.
""I would go in and make coding a requirement starting at the fourth or fifth grade"
Not this "everybody gotta learn to code" bullshit again....
Guess what? Jasper Johns thinks that everybody ought to learn to paint. Magic Johnson thinks everyone should learn to play basketball.
They're ALL wrong.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
and then package design starts in 6th grade.
"Apple CEO Tim Cook: I'd Require All Children To Start Coding In 4th Grade"
Possible translation:
Apple CEO Tim Cook does not have the necessary social skills to manage a large company. Tim Cook is better than former Microsoft CEO Monkey Boy, however.
If I could get all kids to actually, well, read in the fourth grade under our current system I'd be happy. Let's get the essentials fixed before we start adding extravagances.
Or sew.
When I went to junior high school in the 70s, everyone (boys) had to take a round of industrial arts. Which included wood shop, metal shop, drafting, electric/electronic shop, print shop, etc. I think girls got home ec. Then in high school it was optional, and included auto shop and home construction. Pretty much every jr. high school and high school had all this stuff on the premises of every school in the system. (Los Angeles, FWIW. I believe it has all been dismantled now, thanks to Prop 13.)
Schools now don't teach kids any of that stuff unless the kids decide to go to the voc tech high school. But where I live now, choosing the voc tech is an all or nothing deal, it's too far away to go to, if, e.g., you just wanted to take auto shop for a semester.
Elementary schools shouldn't have an agenda. Software is so pervasive in our society that people who want to write software will gravitate towards it. I remember my teacher getting irritated with me when I realized that I could make the Logo turtle do really arbitrary shit. No one taught me how to do that, I just intuitively understood it.
We don't need more programmers, we need more natural born programmers. People that see the logic in programming as an art medium. People that derive genuine satisfaction from doing very interesting but very simple things with software.
The vast majority of humans I've met can not and will not ever be good at writing software. Introducing children to writing software is fine. I was introduced to music at that age and I know I could never be a good musician. I don't regret those music classes but, holy shit am I glad that they weren't vital to my progression through school. Making programming mandatory, or giving it such a high pedestal that people think they *need* to program is insanely harmful to our society. Write music, fiddle with cars, do what makes you happy. If you enjoy writing software then you should do that. You'll know if you enjoy it way before some unqualified teacher forces you to do it.
What's the matter Tim, aren't the H1b's cheap enough anymore?
You want Congress to revoke the child labor laws. so you can buy a bigger new yacht?
Sheesh!
He may be a transport, scheduling, and efficiency expert, but he's no Jobs.
Coding isn't another language. It requires a mindset. The vast majority of people don't want to code and will never have to code.
I consider coding to require the same skills as a novelist. An author has to build a world, keep the entire construct in his mind, make changes, and understand how those changes affect things before and after.
Apple is plowing forward due to Jobs' work and Apple under Cook has yet to release anything insanely great.
Serious question: What has Tim Cook coded? If the answer is nothing of any consequence, I don't see his point.
You have to have the fundamentals of AT LEAST algebra first.
Without the math that underpins ALL computers, you can't program. Not even a spreadsheet.
I think we should also require auto mechanics starting in 4th grade. This is a terrible idea. Not everybody likes coding or has the aptitude for it. It's is like the people who are pushing art or music and how much it improves academic success. Well I can't draw worth a damn and I can't carry a tune, so no matter how hard I tried, I did not do well in those classes. All they did for me was increase my stress levels.
On the other hand I was pretty good at math and science and I am a good programmer. My three children can't program, nor do they have any interest in it. However all of them are good with computers. Computers are like driving a car. You don't need to be an auto mechanic to drive a car and you don't need to be a programmer to use a computer.
If we want improve education in the USA, there is much work that could be done, such meeting basic needs (food, clothing, shelter, medical care) for poor children, or starting a second language in preschool. Trying to turn every student into a programmer is a waste of time and money.
Maybe Tim Cook should pay for it himself.
At what age did Tim Cook learn to program? Probably wasn't in 4th grade and yet, he seems to be pretty successful. Instead of teaching kids to program, how about teaching them how to be creative thinkers. Teach them to be problem solvers. Then, if they do decide to program, they will have something to program.
Surely American kids would be better served by teaching them to dodge active shooters while at school, or gang banger drive by's on the way home ?
Don't laugh. Gunshot is a leading factor in pediatric hospital admissions in many developing countries, such as the US.
Do I think it really makes any sense forcing all kids to "learn to code" in grade school? No. But this is really just a sign of the bigger, looming problem. As technology progresses, we're going to start losing a whole lot of low to middle income jobs to automation. (The ZeroHedge web site just published an article a few days ago where they claim in something like 47 of the 50 states in the U.S., the most popular career is "truck driver". Imagine all of those jobs disappearing as self-driving 18-wheelers and delivery vans/trucks start hitting the roads. And with the big push for "cleaner/greener energy", we're killing off the coal companies. But what many people haven't really considered is that as coal production dies out in America, it doesn't just mean a loss of jobs for the coal miners. It means a few big nails in the coffin for freight rail too. The rail system does a LOT of coal delivery right now, and I don't know of any other product of the same size/volume that would start traveling by rail to replace it? And none of this even touches the "hot topic" of automating all the fast food jobs.)
Meanwhile, about the only "replacement career" I've heard mentioned for all of this is software coding. (Slashdot just recently had an article talking about a former coal miner who became a software developer, in fact.) Everyone in business or politics is grasping at coding as the "savior" for all of these other jobs going by the wayside. I guess it makes sense to an extent. If you're going to automate everything from vehicles driving themselves to robots serving up your food orders, you're going to need people writing and maintaining all the code that makes those things function. But how much continuous employment will it really create?! We all know already from decades of people learning to code that many people who voluntarily chose to do aren't very good at it. Lots of "spaghetti code" and poorly documented code to go around out there.... If you try to make everyone "fluent" in software languages, that doesn't mean the majority of them will actually put in the time and effort required to be really good at it. They'll just know enough to write pretty inefficient, buggy code.
In fact, I think the comparison between learning to speak and write in a second language and learning to code in a computer language isn't even a very good one. If you want to be really successful as a software developer, it's about more than knowing the mechanics of the language. You have to have imagination and vision too. Otherwise, you might be able to change existing code to do specific things someone requests of you, and you might be able to write something new that meets a list of requirements -- but you won't rise above mediocrity. (That's why so much of that kind of coding is outsourced to cheap H1B labor to begin with.) The software devs who really "matter" are the men and women who created something unique that many, many people saw in action and said "Hey... I want to run that on MY computer!" They pushed the limits of what a computer could do within a set of hardware parameters and made people think more highly of the hardware itself. Or sometimes, they just made something that was beautiful in its simplicity. They took things a direction people didn't expect and impressed the users. Learning to master additional human languages has automatic value, simply because it increases your pool of other human beings you can communicate with. It's not the same when you learn to speak the computer's language, because the computer is a "one way street". It only follows your instructions. It doesn't give automatic benefits by way of carrying on a 2 way conversation with you as humans can do.
The first problem is no serious SW engineer calls it "coding". In this area Tim Cook sounds as clueless as any other executive who has never actually done the work he manages.
This is just a different spin on the 'not enough qualified Americans for us to hire' chicanery that tech companies love to use. They want us to believe that they are not hiring H1-Bs because they can force them to do twice the work for half the pay and be contractually bound to them.
Cook, Zuckerberg, and the rest of the bigwigs are all in the tank for Clinton this year. If she gets in you can expect the tech industry to follow the same path as the textile industry out the door. On the bright side everybody will be able to use whichever bathroom they choose.
......being pumped up Cooks ass has backed up into his brain.
Watch Apple to a Yahoo over the next 10 years.
I'd require Tim Cook to come out in public, on a daily national morning TV show.
Just owning all the Abble products isn't enough to make one completely ghey; you have to actually use them as intended. Even if you DID jack off while wearing the iWatch, it wouldn't give them your pulse correctly since Abble has such a closed ecosystem, its not like GNU is gonna help them.
HOWEVER Abble users switching to teh lunis is *PROOF* that homosexuality is a *choice* and IT CAN BE CURED
The one time I went to the Abble store at the mall, the resident ghey Socialst came up to me in his Speedos and offered me a tiny cup of Froot Loops; he explained that sadly, they had to cut back on the portion size because they were running out of money. I politely turned them down because I wasn't sure what they were glazed with. And his iWatch had the wrong time.
C|N>K
If everyone can code the cost of coding goes down. Right now tech people demand salaries that are too high. I mean their starting salaries are matching those of business managers, supervisors, etc. We can't as a society have anyone challenge the wealth of the business men. Therefore, everyone should be able to code so we can put those coder types back to their place as the code monkeys they are. The only profession worthy of a high salary are the guys who "own" ideas and the bosses they hire to make sure ideas they own remain their property and drive profit.
just want cheaper devs.
As I have said innumerable times before, "Fuck you, Tim Cook. Just fuck you."
Why not require them to learn how to Solder, and assemble electronic components, construct circuit boards, and build digital logic circuits first?
The knowledge of the physics and electronics and the discipline of Engineering are more useful than learning a little bit of coding.
Also, coding is a manifestation of digital logic...... And I say start with the fundamentals such as assembly programming and machine language, not the most advanced higher-level topics that are built many layers up on top of the foundational concepts.
He doesn't understand FORTRAN, French or mostly English for that matter!
What a fucking loozer!
Ha ha
The Magsafe power connector is part of "insanely great". Taking it off and replacing it with USB-C is quite the opposite, that is more "save pennies, make millions" mentality..
I think we should eliminate government indoctrination altogether and move to a system that lets the parents decide which educational systems are best. Schools should have to compete like near every other sector of society. This doesn't mean funding charter schools. No. That would be wrong too. We should not be having the government steal money from its citizen to pay for our children’s education. We should not be taxed for this. If we eliminate the taxes the majority of families could cover there own children’s educational expenses. This is not a heartless suggestion either.
I'm not suggesting that there should be no need-based programs necessarily. We probably aught to reform need-based programs and shift the costs of those programs onto the shoulders of parents, and then the children (past high school), however to the extent that the parents / children can pay up. These programs should be privately funded. I think all educational debts should then be extinguishable through bankruptcy too.
This might sound cruel, but there are a lot of people outside the United States that would still have it far worse off. Do you want to give your money to cover every third world child's education? No? Well, neither do I. What I am willing to do is say *freedom* is more important and we should open our boarders instead.
Ask him a question at any of these events and it goes,"Wuat Dat .. Mic a fon man ... my ears ain't on ... u do ... Waits sum ... no ... no ... OK ... Wat's in Hell's yu'uses talk'n me'es Boy! I da Master ... MASTER. U da ... dum honky ... dat right ... U .. deaf and dumb boy. I da king ... KING. MONEY. I GOT'NS MONEY MONEY and U'ses ... GOT SHIT. I da Massa. I da Massa.
Sad that Apple Inc. in Cupertino California is a Costa Rica Banana Plantation.
The schools are already busy teaching kids to be wimpy little fucks, and know-nothings. They don't need to be teaching "humanities" IMO. No, I don't want to swing the pendulum to far the other direction either. We don't need to turn kids into gangstas. How about something right down the middle. Teach boys to be boys, which includes a little rough and tumble, skinned knees, playing with knives, and other "boy" things. There's nothing wrong with encouraging little girls to pursue traditionally "masculine" goals, like sports, STEM, etc, but FFS stop emasculating little boys.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The option should be there, just like art, music, shop/drafting, and any other creative topic. But i would prefer the three Rs plus social(team) and personal physED (no team exercise). The 3 Rs lead to programming since theybare still required.
That is about like requiring all kids to learn how to tare down and rebuild diesel engines around 7th grade as a requirement. There is no purpose to that when it comes to most people. They would get much better options in life if they taught critical thinking and how to manage budgets and pay taxes in their classes than that.
Requiring them learning coding will do nothing for most of those taking it as they have no desire to go into those fields and will generally forget them faster than their required foreign language class before they graduate.
The ONLY purpose this would serve would be to depress wages by trying to force more people into the field when it already has a glut of qualified personnel as is that can't find work at a decent wage already. They are trying to turn a profession with heavy schooling into one with most of the required classes forced down children's throats when they are in public schools at the tax payers expenses to cut their training costs.
What next? We going to start forcing the children to learn neurosurgery at 6th grade to try force those wages down as well?
Considering many companies are turning to H1-B labor because American employees are more expensive, what's the point in forcing a skillset on someone who will likely never get to use it professionally ?
The same argument for STEM. :|
Make it an elective if you want, but not a mandatory requirement. Not everyone wants to sit at a desk and type code for seventy hours a week. I sure as hell don't.
Besides, whatever 'language' they learn in school will be long outdated by the time they graduate.
Additionally, not everyone has access to a computer or even Internet at home so they should probably take that inequality into consideration first.
You want the next generation of American kids to compete ? You might want to tackle our public school problems first. You know, the one where School X has so much money the toilets are gold-plated and School Y can't even afford to hire the teachers they need to teach the basic stuff.
Teaching coding in the 4th grade that was a great thought but think about that student replace his place by you. Here we get his all freedom in his 4th grade whats his interest in ? Every man not born with knowledge is true but every child was not wants to make a coder. Website
...because his business wants to pay its developers less. News at eleven.
Captcha: retail
It seems to me that the CEO of a company that's dodging taxes shouldn't quibble over how our taxes are spent.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I don't know what America you see from your gated community, but the one outside my front door is one where high school graduates cannot read, much less code.
That's sarcasm, right? I hope so. A shocking percentage of computer programmers are musicians (at least 3x as many as in the general population), and this correlation is not a coincidence. Music in the schools teaches skills that give students a leg up in math classes later, and also teaches them skills that make it easier for them to understand how to write code later.
And language skills are also important to learning CS. That's where we learn the basic concepts of grammar that we later build upon when learning about how compilers work.
And history teaches us to avoid making the same stupid mistakes time and time again, and thus greatly increases our chances of still being around to write software in a hundred years.
All of these skills are of vital importance to computer science. Learning science without learning the arts will get you a generation of people who can't program their way out of a paper bag, because they've never learned spatial skills by studying art and perspective, or learned how to create large works of art from a million tiny brush strokes; they've never learned how to see a symphony as a collection of tiny notes, each one equally important; they've never learned to simultaneously use both sides of their brain to precisely count the duration of notes while emotionally feeling how to express them dynamically; and so on.
So no, reducing humanities education is not the solution to the problem. It is the problem.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
People kind of forgot about the dotcom crash already. Yeah, people probably should learn basic coding...but that isn't why it's so trendy to point it out in the news.
It's trendy because right now it's an absurdly high paying job with low barrier to entry.
When we are done vilifying all manual labor and every carpenter and plumbers are pushed aside and snobbed by the swarm of 3rd rate coders, and there's so many programmers salaries tank to nothing and there's a real crash (not the tiny one we got in january) ...then what? Will we keep pushing everyone to have masters in whatever is trendy then?
What we need is comprehensive push to re-glorify apprenticeships of all kinds (including, but not exclusively, programming), so that people who don't want to or can't go to college can still be useful and make a nice life for themselves. Anyone who's played an MMO knows what happens when people who find a "make gold and become rich quick" schemes become overly popular: they become a waste of time.
Tim Cook apparently knows what is best for everyone's children and wishes to mandate it. I appreciate some of Apple;s innovation, but the anti-liberty tyrannical statist views should be ignored.
Like forcing schools to have REAL CS education and equipment. More is spent on worthless sports programs than Math and Science and that is a shameful thing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Being native in a computer language does not necessarily mean better coders, but rather better thinkers able to understand and participate in the world we're in. which is as far as my brain can decipher, about information
Just throwing oil on the fire. But my experience with CS is, like jobs', toxic. It turns your mind linear. Look at the countless pieces of garbage that litter the app store or the internet. Zero imagination comes from having to conform to systems which are so limited in thought.
WHo needs to code when we have siri anyway?
But then the CEOs couldn't pay themselves bajilions of dollars because there'd be too much of a supply of people with their skill set
And this sort of excuse is why so few people understand how computers work. FWIW, I started learning to write BASIC code using the "Teach Yourself BASIC" series of books and tapes in first grade. The only thing hard about it was that I didn't understand multiplication or division, so I didn't really understand those parts of the exercises, but everything else was straightforward.
In about third or fourth grade, I went to a music education conference with my parents, and went to a "Computers in Music" lecture, and they couldn't get their software to work. And suddenly, there I was, this little kid raising my hand and walking up to these college students and teachers to point out their typo.
By fifth grade, I was writing Apple II programs for things like quizzing people on arbitrary subjects. I disassembled part of a computer in class just to point out the various electronic components inside it. And so on.
By the time I took algebra in eighth grade, I was already teaching BASIC programming to other students. The concept of variables was second nature, so algebra came pretty easily. It was basically just a more advanced form of simplifying boolean expressions, just with numbers instead of booleans, and math instead of logical operators. And instead of assigning something to a variable and getting a result based on known values, you were figuring out what values those variables could plausibly have.
So no, in my experience, learning to program makes learning math easier, not the other way around. Math has very limited value when it comes to learning how to write software. It certainly helps you understand how to do math with a computer, but that's a tautology. So you are technically correct that you can't learn how to do math in spreadsheets without knowing math. By that same standard, clearly you can't learn how to drive a car until you learn how to adjust the fuel-air mixture in a carburetor, because race car drivers have to know how to do that....
It does not follow.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
+100
"Those damn engineers cost too damn much, I'd like it if they worked for one third of what they cost now, and if we could abuse the heck out of them."
If we're wedging more stuff into the elementary curriculum, why not teach every kid to have CEO or at least MBA training starting in the fourth grade?
Sure that might also have a tiny negative effect on certain salaries, but that's the free-market for ya!
I am not a sig.
CEO of co specializing in Topic X wants everybody to learn Topic X early and often.
Dow Chemical probably wants chemistry taught in 4th grade also.
Table-ized A.I.
Frankly, I don't like Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates trying to mess around with America's education system. Obama seems to be buying into what the tech CEOs are selling, and pushing more college, in spite of the demands of the job market. https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/01/30/computer-science-all https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/completion_state_by_state.pdf I bet some people in Congress also agree with this stuff. America should not engage in politician directed national education initiatives to try meet European test scores. America should just accept that unlike Europe, America is more violent, has more death from reckless behavior, has lower test scores from lack of interest, and has higher obeisity and shorter lifespans. That can not be changed without brainwashing the population, or making big changes to society. Remember "No Child Left Behind"?
Hopefully a President Trump will have no education policy to ram down kids throats.
We see informercials every week here that we cannot get people who do not smoke pot. Most of the people does not even know and care how to cook, to lift the toilet lid before peeing, how to park correctly the car, or not so force others to smoke around them in public, or for that matter to put trash in the appropriate places and not in the floor...Most people even are functional illiterates....I would guess we have so much more to worry about before extending the policy of no child left behind to programming. How about outlawing programming learning to even the playing field for the less fortunate in the society?
How do You know that programmers who are also musicians are like that because music enables them to understand math? My bet is on any of the logical fallacies, especially post hoc (many technical schools have music because it is the easiest thing to teach technical people, but there is no causal effect between being capable to play and programming), joint effect (both math/programming and playing music requires a calm, analytical mind that is capable to withstand punishing amount of self-training), or even wrong direction (it is people who program who later become musicians, and not musicians who later become programmers).
As for music teaching You skills that give You a leg up in math or make it easier to write code -- I'd like a citation for that, because that smells like absolute bullshit.
As for grammar, I really don't know any, in any of the languages that I speak -- even my mother tongue. And the same is true for most of native speakers of any language -- do a test and ask a person who speaks a language as a native to codify it for You in nice and rigid forms of grammars. Let's not forget, that human grammar is rather different from mathematical and computer grammars -- more rigid and often too formal for most people to "speak", or even comprehend.
The only part of this hilarious rant of Yours that I partially agree with is the history part, but that is of limited effect as well. Technology makes it rather hard, as it changes the playing field very rapidly. To give You an example: designing a new programming language today has the same problems as it did 40 years ago -- so that is the part that we can learn from. But it also has new and more exciting problems right now -- extensive libraries, debugger and syntax support for major IDEs and so on are now much more of an issue for a language to live or die.
As for these things being vital to computer science -- You sound like a failed painter or a musician that learned to code to do anything useful in Your life. Yes, it is an ad personam, but that part really sounds like You provide a forced justification that something You had personally enjoyed also had a deep effect on programming -- that's a choice-supportive bias. Please, resist writing a sequential, causal narrative into Your life -- Your life was definitely much greater than that. My bet is that You feel that code works like music, because it does -- to You. You have an affinity for both, and had learned to operate abstractions found in music, and then partially reused some of these abstractions in programming later on. But the same thing could have happened to You by learning architecture, furniture design, bookmaking, medicine or gardening -- any abstraction learnned in any of these fields, or any indeed possible field, could potentially be reused in programming.
Reducing humanities education is a solution. I would really love not to be tortured by classical literature, and having to paint or being forced to play a fucking flute. Not a single part of that was useful in my life, and I heavily doubt that it will. We really don't need as much humanities as people who wish to become musicians later on. And they don't need as much programming. How about we recognize talent as early as possible, and then help people recognize it -- and then, if they want it, help them develop it on their own. Stop education, it's a cancer of the soul.
"It is only logical."
Children must be taught that freedom is to be staunchly guarded, and relying on proprietary software - especially an OS that only works with a specific brand of hardware - is like wearing a shackle willingly.
that prevents kids from coding on the ipad and sharing the code? If not he needs to shut up! It's his fault that his product can't be used that way!
It was a dump of detention slips.
The last one basically illustrated what the fuck is wrong with the American education system - whiny letter to a parent because a kid corrected a teacher who insisted 1km == 1 mile, with a focus on 'blatant disregard for authority'.
You don't get creative thinking and logical problem solving when the entire system is set up for training how to lick the boots of "authority" without question.
I'd argue that not only do we not need to force coding down everyone's throat, but that we should minimize the role of computers in a child's education.
Stick with typing classes in junior high, and finally expand on computer use in high school to prepare them for college.
Using computers in 4th grade, that will be 8-10 years out of date by the time they get to college is pointless.
We live in a world of information. So let us teach them about information first. What is information? How has it been encoded, stored, reproduced, processed and transmitted throughout history? What is probability? How does information affect our beliefs about the probability of events? What is encryption? How trustworthy is a source of information? How do we assess that?
Learning about information must include material about the concept of processing information by an algorithm - but actual coding is not necessarily for everyone. Being literate about information is an fundamental skill for anyone who lives in the information age.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Shut the fuck up you piece of shit troll and shoot yourself and your whole fucking family while you're at it.
This morning - I took a great big SHIT. It was so big, it clogged the toilet with no toilet paper. I'm talking about it a shit log as big around as my fist. It rose up out of the toilet water, enhancing the smell, the aroma, the flavor you could taste. It was big, nasty, smelly, and greasy. It was a big healthy SHIT.
This doesn't belong on Slashdot - it belongs on Facebook. Get it straight.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Software development is mostly problem analyzing and solving, not writing the instructions for the solution.
Kids should be learned to solve "complex" logical problem, not to write code.
The skill to analyze and solve logical problems can also be applied to other places.
"I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about government funding of grade school coding classes."
I think it would be a waste of my tax dollars, just like most government funded garbage.
There is only a shortage of developers who are willing to accept the wages that Apple would like to pay. Apple already has enough trouble with software quality. Creating lots of developers might increase the supply in 20 years, but all the good people will just leave the business for something better paid. I can only imagine how bad Apple devices will become when they are developed by low paid incompetents. Of course, anyone can be taught the mechanics of a basic programming language, but to produce people who are capable of engineering and designing big systems, is not so easy. The majority of people either don't seem to have the focus, attention span, or aptitude for it. I'd say in my own Computer Science degree, there were few people who actually came out of the course that would have actually made good software engineers, even though everyone could write some java, c, and assembler to do basic things. If the skills to do this were teachable, they have broader benefits for society, and would be extremely valuable. If everyone though logically, then there would be no religion, and it would become impossible for the dreadful right wing politics of modern America to exist.
have proper mechanical, trade and home ec skills than programming.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This is a field all children should be educated in! Wait... Why not shoemaking and welding and asphalt laying? Sorry, the point I was trying to make is that maybe we should try not to give the kids a profession in fourth grade? Teach them the basics and let them decide for them selves when they get older... programmers are a dying profession anyway.
They advertized coding to parents and kids. The result more people try to study CS many if them fail quickly other manage somehow to get their bachelor, but it is not their thing. They are not good at it. It will also not help to force it on them.
Kids should learn social norms, how to get along with each other, and conflict solving in school. They should learn two or more languages. It helps to get around. And they should learn about math and science including building things. That helps them more than any coding rubbish.
Cook is either dumb or just wanted to say something on education.
This is stupid. There are already a bunch of children who has to suffer through things like maths. They aren't stupid, they just don't have the ability or interest. Next thing they will make coding a requirement for passing your year. Then we create a whole new group of 'second class citizens' in schools who might have been good at some academic pursuits, but end up in low paying jobs.
CODING DOES NOT TEACH YOU HOW TO USE COMPUTERS! IT DOES NOT!
I know some really good coders that cannot use a computer properly. And some of them won't know where to begin looking if their computer goes wrong.
Teach kids how to use a computer for things they will actually need it for some day. And NOT computer science.
They don't need to be teaching "humanities" IMO.
You don't think we should teach kids history or geography? These are future voters, those subjects seem to be absolutely essential.
FFS stop emasculating little boys.
Apart from some over-zealous health and safety related idiocy, I think we are approaching a pretty good balance. None of this 1950s "boys don't cry" bullshit. We need more male teachers to provide role models for young boys, but people have been complaining that the next generation are a bunch of pussies since they weren't drafted into the military and sent off to war.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"I'd Require All Children To Start Coding In 4th Grade. The best are assigned to debug iTunes indefinitely. The remainder are sent to the sweatshops to polish iPhone cases so they learn what happens to naughty little Apple Scouts who don't code hard enough.
"In 5th grade the darlings (those who aren't debugging iTunes) are tested again. The best are locked in a room with an Apple Watch until they think of a feature someone will pay money for. The rest spend the "school year" gluing shattered iPad screens back together to sell to the Asian market.
"In 6th grade the children are given one last chance to avoid manual labor. The best are sent to scour the technology sector for ideas Apple can steal--er...invent and bestow unto a rapturous public. The remaining recalcitrant Apple cubs are sent to the Cupertino mines to dig Jobs ore to feed the reality distortion generators.
As you can see, here at Apple we have a strong and comprehensive program for children."
You do realize that not teaching humanities results in "know-nothings", right? It's an umbrella term for anything that isn't hard science or vocational training, from arts to geography to philosophy to history.
And if you're neither Johnny Knoxville nor Leonidas yet have a dick, sucks to be you?
I was taught how to use knives as well as power tools in school. I was also thaught they're not toys. You don't play with them, you use them to make toys to play with.
How about we stop obsessing over whether people are masculine, feminine or whatever and just let them be whatever works for them? They'll probably end up being both happier and, for what it's worth, more productive.
Life's hard enough without having to put on a show.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
This is a massive waste of money, and will be yet another way to squander the inborn joy for learning so many students have by forcing their face into a subject they just plain don't need.
This is going to be just another subject that nobody actually gives a fuck about except for a few students who probably would have gone into it anyway. This will also turn off at least a few from ever exploring these options, which they might have done had their initial experience not been crammed down their throat. Most people don't have the mindset to make good programs. Heck, it's arguable that the people who DO have the mindset often struggle to keep it up, and fail regularly. Plus, doing useful work takes a lot more knowledge than just knowing how to string together if statements and loops. You are not going to be making a customized application integrated into existing corporate computing infrastructure by knowing how to use printf() and scanf(), not even close - you're going to need to have at least some idea how it works, how to make APIs work together, and a lot of other things. And that doesn't even get into the skill needed to put together good code that actually does what it's supposed to, or the knowledge of algorithms to know what you can use to try to make the system more efficient, which is going to be a necessity, especially if your crappy code is working with everyone else's crappy code chewing up the CPU and memory.
At best, what these companies want are cheap coders by making them over-abundant, forcing wages to go down, even though 95% of them will produce shit code. To be a good coder, you need talent, and you need to enjoy it to some extent, at least when you're starting. School can't help with the first, and it systematically destroys the enjoyment of learning so it exterminates the latter.
I would say that schools should make it accessible, but not require it. When I went through elementary school in the 80s, there was a computer lab. We were taken to it and said here's some edutainment games, and if you boot it without a disk you'll get this weird prompt. Also, here's a place where you can make a turtle draw some things. And there's some books over there. Do with these resources whatever you feel like, there is no grading or anything (because there was no real curriculum, just an abstract sense that these computer things were important and people needed to get comfortable with them).
So some folks would be learning about geography, chemistry, whatever based on the edutainment games they picked, and those so inclined could see what they could make the computer do in a more open ended way. As a consequence, the only people who learned coding were those with an inherent passion and inclination for the right way of thinking (well, back then a software developer wasn't seen as a super-profitable career to be pursued over most any other job either, and in fact there was a stigma associated with that sort of behavior so you got only the folks who were *really* interested)
Having more guidance available would have been great as elective type stuff, but at the end of the day, people have to recognize that coding is a vocational sort of thing and should not be a requirement any more than an auto mechanic course should be required for everyone. The result of more and more *forced* coding exposure is a dilution of the talent pool. I would say that the state of software development in general is in a pretty sorry state, but largely because of the fact the career is seen as an accessible cash cow, drawing a lot of people who are not really inclined to do the work to do it anyway. Adding more people indiscriminately to the equation only makes things worse.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How stupid! Many schools are dropping cursive handwriting, which is useful for everyone, because they claim they don't have the time. And he wants them to teach programming, which 99% of them will never use?
I wrote a few CPM programs in the mid-eighties that were good enough to be distributed. I've not only not written one science then, I've never felt a needs. It's far easier to find better software written by others.
We want our children to be good humans. We don't want them to be another Apple product.
Yes, that's what corporate CEOs do: they ask for handouts from the government. In this case, Tim Cook wants free training for the job skills needed by his company in order to reduce his labor costs.
Of course, I don't put it past Tim Cook to actually believe that he just wants to do something good "for the children" and that computers ought to be part of the school curriculum. In fact, computers ought to be: computer science is fundamental to modern mathematics and science and ought to be part of the math and science curriculum. But teaching basic computer science is not the same as teaching "coding". Coding is a job skill and has no more place as a part of a universal school curriculum than "welding", "tax preparing", or "chocolate making".
> You have to have the fundamentals of AT LEAST algebra first.
> Without the math that underpins ALL computers, you can't program. Not even a spreadsheet.
Some understanding of binary logic is critical, but please show a single use of polynomials in all of the Perl or Python libraries.
I started programming in 9th grade, as I repeated 7th grade, I was basically "at age of a 10th grader".
I really doubt it makes any sense at all to teach programming, regardless how much you cut it down, before age of perhaps 15.
On the other hand, the way teaching is done in western civilizations is completely wrong anyway. A more holistic approach (instead of dividing everything up into its own classes) would cut down time to study greatly.
I really hated to need to learn what a "plusquam perfect" is in Latin, and then again in English, and surprisingly again in German. Either you once grasp it or you don't ... repeating the exact same thing in 3 languages (defining "tenses" in grammar" is a complete waste of time and an annoyance for the students that are good at it and a pure hell for those who are not).
As long as we don't have again a teaching and learning friendly programming language, like Pascal, teaching "kids" how to code is a waste of time for everyone involved.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And you are really using "football" as an example for non-homosexual thinking?
Dude you watched too much Drag Race and went not to the "bear convention" the main chat topic there, except hard sex, is .. "football".
Football is also the sport where "gay" & "fagot" are most likely used to insult others .. and you though that comes from nothing?
I demand all these traits to be taught starting with Kindergarden!
That'd be idiotic off course, but that's the point here, and so I also add coding to that list!
I think maybe focus on the reading writing and math before worrying about coding. My wife a teacher knows too well how lacking and disinterested kids and parents are in education these days. Kids feel they have to be entertained in order to learn. Does ever child need to know how to code? No, but they should know how to write a complete sentence and balance their finances.
the tech giants are still going to import their developers using h1-b anyway. whether there's qualified americans for the jobs or not they will still import the foreigners for less, if not outright outsource overseas.
When you neglect our own education system and take foreign interests before our own.
This is what happens when you ignore infrastructure.
This is what happens when you're desperate to fix our rather pathetic security systems at the last minute (see the previous ancient government technology articles).
they can always go to the Apple tantalum mines. Those small bodies can really squeeze through the tunnels.
... to the Harry Potter Academy of Computing! Here you will learn plenty of magic spells that do quick and flashy things to amaze the muggins. Remember to bring your StackOverflow spellbook, where you will find all the spells you will ever need.
Kids don't need to start coding in 4th grade. It would be far better to start teaching them how to think logically and stepwise; then start teaching them algorithm construction, then data structures, then some of the classic programming problems, like youngest uncle, shortest route, recursion, and suchlike. Once the sticky little darlings have been thru this regimen satisfactorily, then maybe you can teach them to code. Of course, there is the problem of which language do you teach them to code in, and how long will that language be au courant before the next-big-thing language comes along.
It would make a lot more sense to teach project management or business analyst skills to 4th graders, since almost all coder jobs are outsourced to 3rd world.
None of this coding in elementary school is going to help my bank's website get fixed.
No, the new mantra popular with many seems to be 'boys have no right to cry.'
Tim Cook wants to have *all* children taught to approach a problem with an approach so well defined a computer can solve it. Just what we really need in the world today, as we continue to charge into uncharted territory, with society exploding and new jobs appearing by the second, and the novel challenges ahead as we experiment with our future, is a mindset mono-culture imposed on our children.
It's awesome to read the comments and see such a variety of reasons explaining why Tim Cook idea is a terrible one.
Hey, substitution in language works just as well as in math....who knew.
"We fundamentally believe that carpentry is a skill and that just like other skills are required in school, wood-working should be required in school. I do think wood-working and auto-shop are as important-- if not more important -- as the second language that most people learn in today's world. I would go in and make wood-working and chainsaw maintenance requirements, starting at the fourth or fifth grade, and I would build on that year after year after year...I think we're doing our kids a disservice if we're not teaching them and introducing them in that way."
Let's step back a bit from this and try to understand that computers and programming rank about as important in the life's general scheme as a pick and shovel. We all survived for millions of years without them before they arrived. We will probably last longer as a species if we wake up, get off the marketing bandwagon, and remove computers from grade school all together. Why not leave the leaning of chainsaws to people who need chainsaws. Computers are a tool. Unfortunately an inordinate amount of social focus and resource are being diverted to this one thing because people want to sell that.
Apple has a vested interest in selling computers. The computer market is declining because the average person doesn't actually need one. How to market computers? Convince governments that they need to spend your money to teach coding before the 4th grade.
To be clear, any technology focus that kids learn in the 4th or 5th grade will be completely obsolete by the time they reach the end of college. Why not focus on teaching kids how to learn and assess the world for themselves instead of filling their heads with obsolete information?
So run for political office then. It's easy to make claims about "what you'd do" (we refer to them as broken campaign promises) - much harder to actually implement. You know, unless you're trying for a dictatorship.
Because software development is EVERYTHING the world needs. What about microwave engineers that design all the high-speed crap that runs the fucking software and gets more complicated every day? I'm sure every 4th grader would love laying out a circuit that cares about a 10 degree trace bend versus 15 degree. Probably about as much as they would love software development., eh?
I'm a porker.
Remember when educators were going to teach all their students HTML, because that's what kids needed for THE COMPUTERY FUTURE.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
I would require Apple executives perform stoop labor in the fields from sunrise until sunset. Too bad Steve Jobs is dead. I guess I could dig him up and tie his corpse to one lucky executive each day.
The Turd Report? Is that you?
Actually, technical schools are less likely to have music programs than liberal arts colleges, not more. So the correlation is in spite of a negative correlation in availability of music classes.
That doesn't sound like music to me. Music is fun, first and foremost. If you aren't enjoying it, you're doing it wrong. :-)
You're probably correct that there's a joint effect at work here, but any such joint effect means that at an absolute minimum, the two skills both benefit from certain parts of the brain being wired in certain ways, and therefore both skills will tend to exercise the brain in similar ways.
Definitely not. Very few people ever successfully learn to play musical instruments after they graduate from high school, much less college. By contrast, a lot of people went into CS because they started out as musicians and, upon getting to college, learned that there's no money in it.
When you truly know a language like a native speaker, the grammar often becomes intuitive. Either way, though, whether consciously or unconsciously, you learned to recognize the patterns and to replicate them.
BTW, although it is true that computer grammars are a lot more rigid than natural languages, even in natural languages, there tend to be certain near-invariant aspects. For example, in English, adjectives always come before the nouns that they modify (ignoring predicate adjectives, that is).
Having good grammar and spelling also makes you better able to communicate with the people around you, which comes in handy when you're trying to explain the software architecture that you're designing.
But you're right that education in English (or whatever one's native language is) is by far the least correlated with CS success. It is also not strongly correlated with music or, really, much of anything else besides other writing-related classes. So let me pose it a different way. If we don't have writers, we don't have news, and we don't know what's happening in the world. For the same reason that knowing enough of history to avoid repeating it is important, knowing whether we're already repeating it is important. :-D
Actually, no. I started learned to code at about the same time as I learned piano (late first grade and early second grade, respectively). Learning music didn't make it easier to learn programming later, because I learned both during the same part of my life. That said, for people who picked up CS later in life, musicians statistically do better than average.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So everyone can write their own word processor? The goal of this kind of curriculum should be an understanding of computers, not how to code. Or better yet, how about schools getting their ass in gear and learning how to teach instead?
In the early decades each mainframe had tens of coders. Now there are hundreds of billions CPUs driving everything from microwaves, to cars (dozens) and media players to name a few. Every citizen in a developed compant has a couple hundred of thes CPU setvants. And the number of coders has grown more slowly to a few million at most. The future Internet of Things predicts thousands of CPUs per human. Hardware and software with expand into every imaginable niche.
I woud be happier to see universal understanding science and arithmetic. Coding is a special case of STEM. There is so much misunderstanding of basic science on both sides of the poltical spectrum
Actually, technical schools are less likely to have music programs than liberal arts colleges, not more. So the correlation is in spite of a negative correlation in availability of music classes.
Not quite what I argue, because the same is true for any class that studies humanities: liberal arts colleges will always have more humanities classes than technical colleges, just as technical colleges will always have more math than liberal arts colleges. This argument (while I agree, it is unfounded and more speculative than counterexamplary) states, that in technical colleges there could be more music classes than poetry or drawing classes. This could, if supported by evidence, explain the higher incidence of musicians that are also graduates of technical schools than, for instance, poets who are also graduates of technical schools. Such a correleation could explain the higher incidence of techies who are also musicians.
But again, I'd have to support this with evidence, which I haven't -- the same thing holds for further possibilites for fallacy. I was merely speculating on the possible logical fallacies that could have been made.
That doesn't sound like music to me. Music is fun, first and foremost. If you aren't enjoying it, you're doing it wrong. :-)
Firstly, how much time did You spend learning how to play an instrument? Do You believe that this would be possible without a mind that is calmly capable of analyzing mistakes it had made, and then making corrections? Or do You believe that Your skill in playing an instrument stems exactly from pure emotions You have?
Secondly, who says that analytical things aren't fun? Go and talk to a mathematician about a mathematical topic they enjoy. Ask them about a proof they find beautiful, or exciting -- consider their emotions and how much fun they have, even in explaining it to You. I have the same tingling, when it comes to programming and mathematics -- want to talk about Collatz conjencture or some wonderful proofs of geometric facts, like the Pythagorean theorem? You'd hear (and see) a pure smile on my face as I explain why I think these things excite my brain. I'd say, that fun is a motivator, but it requires extensive, self-punishing training -- that is, I shall do this tiresome thing because it will bring me joy later on. I believe that the same thing is true for both mathematics and music. And I believe that true followers of both professions have tremendous fun with them.
You're probably correct that there's a joint effect at work here, but any such joint effect means that at an absolute minimum, the two skills both benefit from certain parts of the brain being wired in certain ways, and therefore both skills will tend to exercise the brain in similar ways.
Just because two things use the same wiring of the brain (which is what we assume here), doesn't necessarily mean that excersising one helps the other. The correlation can also be a negative one: one thing might be damaging to the other.
Definitely not. Very few people ever successfully learn to play musical instruments after they graduate from high school, much
No, but I wouldn't describe it as a "punishing amount of self-training". First, unlike programming, most people are taught to play music, rather than being self-trained. The stuff that you do on your own is more typically practice. The distinction is subtle, but important; training is learning new skills, whereas practice is honing existing skills through repetition. Second, the word "punishing" sounds like practicing an instrument is torture. Well, maybe if you play violin, but....
I didn't say that they aren't. You can find fun in anything; I didn't mean to imply otherwise. My point was that if it feels like punishment, that's probably a bad sign. :-)
True, but if that were the case, there wouldn't be a strong correlation between musical ability and programming ability, because learning music would ruin you as a programmer, rather than strengthening your spatial-temporal reasoning as it appears to do.
Certainly true. I've definitely hit a plateau where improvement is relatively slow because of lack of practice. That would be true for splitting your time between any two or more skills, of course. I wouldn't call that a failure, though, just a choice of balance between competing activities. For that matter, I also have to balance it with all of my other hobbies, including writing, photography, videography/moviemaking, woodworking, electronics, etc. After all, there's only so much time in a lifespan.
Although true, it's not really the same. This is why we take the time to laboriously measure wood before we cut it (and then swear when we measured it wrong). There's a lot of planning involved, a lot of design, a lot of careful planning. With music, you have to do almost everything in real time. There's careful planning, but the careful planning is in the form of doing the same thing over and over until you can do it (approximately) right every time. I guess to some extent that's true for some aspects of woodworking, such as turning something on a lathe, but it is kind of the exception rather than the rule, and it is also the sort of thing that we often do with CNC machines these days.
Now in theory, writing software is supposed to involve lots of advance planning, too, but in practice, we usually just hack it together with Perl. And software continually gets redesigned. It's the computer equivalent of an office building's architecture, where you build the basic structure to be flexible, knowing that they are going to rip the walls out every two years and completely change everything... except that they constantly change the slabs and the roof, too. That's why learning to rapidly adjust to unexpected inputs results in both better musicianship and better coding.
I will, however, grant you architecture and gardening, at least when done on a large scale. The ability to visualize such things in three dimensions
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
IMO, what makes the study from that APA link so interesting is that it strongly suggests an actual causal link between early music education and brain development that improves executive function. As I understand it, they took two groups of kids and started teaching them music one year apart. The kids who started taking music a year earlier did better on IQ tests at the end of the study period. Now obviously, IQ tests aren't everything, but it does at least suggest that early music education might well be beneficial in ways that go far beyond what most folks would expect, rather than musicality merely being an ability that happens to attract people with similar mental abilities as CS. At the very least, it is worthy of more formal study, IMO.
I see a bit of a problem with the APA study. We have two groups of children - first one has X amount of classes, the other has X+1 amount of classes. That does leave room for one more thing: add another class with formal instruction and the IQ goes up, whatever that subject might be -- provided it engages the intellect. Would an additional PE class work the same? Would teaching how to graphically program simple applications work the same?
And again, for college freshmen, it is controlled for income, parent education and so on: but is it controlled for the amount of work they did? Similarly to the 6 year olds, could they be just simply working more than their peers, which leads to elevated IQ scores?
And again, could this effect be caused by elevated IQ scores? That is, it is the children with higher IQ scores who play better and continue to be engaged in the process, or the other way around? And for the 6 year olds: could the raise in average IQ levels be attributed to single individuals with musical talents whose intellect becomes so much more engaged that they raise the overall score?
No disagreement here. None of the studies out there are perfect, and I'm not really arguing that music is critical to CS instruction, but rather taking a contrarian position to point out that we can't assume that those other areas aren't important, particularly when there's evidence that they might actually be important.
One thing I would point out, though, is that people who do music tend to have less time for studying. School band usually soaks up two or three hours almost every afternoon in the fall semester, plus usually football games every Friday night, plus band competitions all day on Saturday. I would be surprised if those folks actually put in more time studying, because I'd be surprised if that were even possible. It is more likely that the opposite is true—that they're forced to use their limited studying time more efficiently, and as a result, don't find it as onerous. It is also quite possible that additional socializing in school actually provides a tangible benefit in terms of outcomes, with band being just one way of doing that.
I guess the bottom line is that any changes to our education system need to be tested first, and if the changes seem to help, we should roll them out more broadly. Right now, it seems like education changes get rolled out haphazardly and broadly first, and ten years later, we panic and ask why our kids are falling behind in science.... :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have to say I am not a fan. My kids school teaches coding in Year 2 onwards. Clearly the curriculum is based on "lets dumb down coding for kids and teachers" and has no real world applications. This is evidenced by not being able to pass on any of my PHP dev work to them. Filthy leeches.
I'd require Apple to back off the restrictions and allow any user-created code to run with whatever privileges the user wants. Otherwise, what's the point of having kids coding? Wait, never mind, it's to further drive down the costs of software production for Apple, not to help the populace in any meaningful way.
and nobody will need to code anymore ;-)
Herve S.
I could have said woodshop. Same thing. I could have said home ec. Same thing. I could have said any other fucking example besides coding. I could have said English.
You are dumb as fuck.
I had an Intel 8080-based Altair 8800. I couldn't afford that fancy Microsoft BASIC, but I taught myself how to code in 8080 assembly language. Then I went with my grandfather for his three-day college reunion and taught myself BASIC. Further languages ensued. Academically, I concentrated in Physics, Math, and Psychology, but not computers. Finally, after three and a half decades working as a software developer, I took my first computer engineering course and learned Verilog. I would be thrilled if all students had the generous kind of access I had to computers but I just don't think everyone needs to learn how to code.
Teaching everyone to program would be like training everyone in the 1950's to be machinists. Coming out of WWII, machines were an elite bunch, not unlike the programmers of today. They were indispensable for churning out the copious war machines of that war. But then CNC lathes and milling machine were invented, and highly-paid machinists have become a rarity (compared to highly-paid programmers at least).
The AI renaissance will similarly obviate the need for all but the most elite programmers. Imagine a decendent of Siri/Cortana/Now/Edge that can answer any question and perform virtually any concrete task. And not just information-based tasks, thanks to the burgeoning fields of robotics and the IoT. Advanced, PhD-level AI/ML will "soon" be the only employable computer science skill set. And basic programming is so far removed from machine learning as to be nearly useless for understanding and/or controlling AIs.
Education on programming, like any topic, will be ubiquitously available (the AIs will be teaching us), and kids will be free to pursue any topic that interests them.