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.

Comments

I'd argue we need more humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[thesupraman]

I counter your 'Tech inclined kids will find coding on their own' with:

(Drum roll please)

Parents should teach their children how to be good members of society, and it is not only not the place
of schools to teach that, but it is explicitly overstepping their role to assume they have the right to teach
children social values. Schools are for teaching facts and how to learn, not to shape hearts and
minds (although they certainly think thats their job these days)..

Or do you think some random teacher is the best person to decide on the social values or your child?
Think about it..

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[ArmoredDragon]

Being a good member of society usually means you don't discriminate, bully, etc.

That's nice and all, but it occurs to me that the message lately has been that you the only people you don't discriminate against are legally protected groups, and it's perfectly fine to discriminate against anybody else. For example, it's cool to bash rednecks, even though all of the ones I've met are some pretty honest working guys that are actually pretty fun to have a beer with, even though I don't like beer, or country music, or any of the other stuff they're in to. I mean shit, if rednecks were a minority group, people would shame you for using the term redneck.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Kokuyo]

I would be willing to bet hard cash that you are not content with the skill these parents nowadays show when it comes to morals, ethics and social behavior. Yet you think they should teach these values. Do you see where I'm going with this?

We must get away from this thinking that everybody needs to be self-sufficient and skilled at everything. We need to diversify education and stop putting so much stock in marketable skills. That way lies slavery and cultural ruin.

Human minds are too valuable to let them all be mined for productivity.

I mean, let's be serious here. Would this world be a better place if that fidgety child back when had been given ritalin and told to sit still instead of being sent to dance lessons and grow up to become the choreographer behind Cats and Phantom of the Opera? She's a millionaire, by the way. I expect she doesn't cry herself to sleep that she never got that fancy career in HR that might otherwise have been open to her.

Better idea.

[DRMShill]

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.

Oh for fuck's sake

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

""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.

Re:Oh for fuck's sake

[uncqual]

Most people never directly use the Pythagorean theorem either (I don't count those in the construction trade who know the "3-4-5 rule" but don't realize why it works as "using it directly"), but we still teach it - should we stop doing that?

I think teaching some programming (not "computer science" as the post seems to confuse it with) in grade school is appropriate. It gives early exposure to students to an area that may be of interest to them. It helps them understand a system where they give an unthinking machine instructions and the unthinking machine follows those instructions faithfully and, if they instructions are "wrong", give the wrong result blindly. It teaches them that details matter on a "larger" project -- too many students that I've worked with in Fourth through Eighth grade think "guessing" is an appropriate response to most any math problem if they don't know the answer, programming will reinforce that "guessing" isn't usually a great way to proceed in such situations. It also helps the student understand why the computer "makes mistakes" (i.e., it's almost always a programmer that made the mistake) and that to make a computer do something "it should be able to do" requires telling it explicitly what to do (I'm leaving out systems that "learn" here -- I don't think we will be trying to, in the near future, teach Fourth Graders how such systems work).

Really....

[johnsmithperson123]

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.

Re: Possible translation:

[Bing Tsher E]

Cook also doesn't have any kids. For him it is always "other people's kids."

Re:Possible translation:

[E-Rock]

He seems a lot like Balmer to me. Milking their existing product lines and introducing new products that just follow the competition.

Re:Why?

[uassholes]

No, it's about cheap labor. All kids are demanding access to electronics, they don't need coding classes for that.

tax money

[Gravis Zero]

It seems to me that the CEO of a company that's dodging taxes shouldn't quibble over how our taxes are spent.

Re:What age did Tim Cook learn to program?

[ljw1004]

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.

In the UK in my generation, a large portion of kids learnt to program in 4th or 5th grade using "BBC B" computers and the "Logo" turtle graphics programming language. I think it was more common than not to have it connected via RS232 to a little turtle robot.

I myself volunteered to teach in India for a year back in 1992 and I taught my 9th and 10th graders Logo too. It was a HUGE enabling vehicle for them to be creative thinkers and problem solvers, more so than any of the other classes they were taking.

There are so many naysayers in these discussions who can only imagine a single intended outcome of "learn to code" which is that people will join the job market as coders. But it's far more than that...

Coding is the best classroom activity for developing a child's intellectual+logical problem solving skills (craft+shop is for developing their practical problem solving skills; literature+debate for developing their rhetorical problem solving skills).

Coding also enables them to be more intellectually adept participants in their society, by equipping them with the tools to make sense of the information-saturated world around them. They'll be able to whip up a spreadsheet to check their mortgage payments. They'll be able to scrape websites to make sense of a talking point, or just to have the autonomy to pick what media they consume rather than accepting what big media shovels down their throats.

Re: Why?

[Bengie]

Describe a problem

Understanding the problem in order to describe it is the single hardest part of programming. 80% of programmers don't understand problems, they throw code at a problem and see if the customer thinks it solves the issue. Most programmers rarely understand how their own code works. I question how good automatic code generators can become because human language is a horrible language to describe problems. 7% of communications is verbal, 60% of knowledge cannot be described with human language. I'm not math wiz, but unless a computer can learn how to interpret body language and tone and read between the lines, the best someone can communicate with a computer via natural language is about 7% * 60% = 4.2%.

Unless humans magically become better at communication, automatic code generation is dead on arrival for all but the simplest of tasks.