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

[Dcnjoe60]

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..

Where do you draw the line. Being a good member of society usually means you don't discriminate, bully, etc. Yes, parents should teach that at home. However, when it occurs in a classroom saying the school is overstepping their role in teaching social values?

The OP was simply saying that instead of teaching coding, maybe schools should go back to teaching more humanities and arts. If studying history or music is stepping beyond their bounds, then what should they be teaching?

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

After graduating with STEM degrees, I've spent much of my time reading about history. It's one of my favorite subjects. I'm not sure it would have worked out quite as well going the opposite direction of getting a degree in history, then teaching myself quantum mechanics, differential geometry and semiconductor electronics.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Not at all. You'd like it that school was for that, I gather, but schools have always been, and still are, a social engineering tool. Their whole purpose is to turn children into successful members of society, and that involves teaching social values.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Baron von Daren]

An integral facet of any functional society is a core ethos or ethic that unites its citizens in common bond and in many ways defines the society itself. The language might be antiquated, but you know things like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A social ethos goes beyond a sentence or a document and it can be difficult to define the extent of its scope, but the point here is that civil society requires things like, well civility, to function long term. Arguing that it’s the sole responsibility of parents to teach ethics is ideologically divorced from pragmatic reality. Any society worth its salt will invest in teaching its citizens the ethical requirements of being a member of that society. As usual, this could be a long and interesting discussion in and of itself, but I’ll leave it here.

As for teaching all children coding; I’m not against it in the abstract, but I’ll stop well short of making it a core part of the curriculum during the entire educational process. Because humans are linguistic animals, and language is so closely tied to thought, coding is more than simply vocational training, but at the same time, we shouldn’t overestimate its importance. Juxtapose it with teaching a traditional language, for example: both shape the mind in the way only languages can, but traditional languages allow humans to interact with other humans, coding allows humans to interact with technology. Is one more important than the other? I don’t know that I can say definitively because the evolution of humanity has always been intertwined with our technologies, so it may be a false dichotomy. That being said, if I had to choose one thing for my children, that they exceled at communicating and interacting with other humans or with technology, I would choose the former.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Maxo-Texas]

What the heck do you think made america strong, collegial, and capable of holding different beliefs while still working together?

The public school system. It was propaganda and it also welded us into an alloy of one people.

The new system is balkanizing and destroying the country. It's literally turning the U.S. into many parallel cultures and many separate peoples who refuse to work together and who lack any shared values.

It's a great way to set the U.S. up to fail.

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.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe we could start by teaching you not to be so judgemental, especially when you base your conclusion that the GP is "not a decent person to be teaching kids social value" on a single internet comment.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[localman]

You misunderstand the goal of public education. The goal is to provide a basic level of education in the cases where parents will drop the ball. This is exactly as needed with social values as it is with academics. If you are a good, educated, socially conscientious parent, then public school will be relatively easy for your kid and you'll supplement what they don't teach with regular life lessons at home. But sadly there are a huge number of kids that get little to nothing in the way of lessons at home, and a significant number that get bad lessons at home. Public education gives these kids a tiny something in the way of outside influence to counter their bad luck at being born to a struggling family.

I'm sure some people will call out that our schools are doing a bad job at academics so why expect them to do a good job at social values? To counter that let me give a bit of advice: never judge anything without a comparison point. If you think the schools are doing a bad job at providing a base level education for a huge, diverse population without turning anyone away, please tell me what you're comparing it to. Private schools that can select their pupils? Magnets schools that only get kids from families that are concerned about education? Home schooling that is well beyond the means of most families? These are all better options, but they are only options to a minority of children. The rest need public education and most of those need social value education in addition to academics.

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Feyshtey]

The parents whoms kids you kicked out also want an education for their kids.

No, they dont. And that's the god damn problem. They dont want shit for their kids. They laugh when the kids are belligerent assholes. They encourage them to be bullies. They allow them to show disrespect. They teach them to protest every god damn thing under the sun, and to shift any and all possible blame for any situation they find themselves in to some other evil, imagined or otherwise, and give them no understanding at all about fixing the god damn problem themselves.

So it is the parents fault if kids don't "integrate", get no education end up in crimes and jail? Can't be as you obviously think it is the kids fault? Or is it the teachers fault? Or the fault of idiots like you?

It is the parent's fault. Entirely the parent's fault. It is not the state's responsibility to raise well-mannered kids. The lack of education stems very first from the lack of value parent's place in education. At the worst school in the country, a child with a parent who emphasizes education will receive a usable education. Better still, a parent who does not assume that education ends in a classroom will further that education at home, even if its as simple as instilling a habit in a child to look up a word they dont know in the god damn dictionary. I can blame the child for bad behavior right up to the point that the realization sinks in that the parent didn't properly discourage bad behavior. I will give a certain degree of leeway in the case of systemically cancerous environments like the inner cities, because the child is bombarded by bad influences. But at that point I place the remainder of the blame on the state which has fed the cancer at every turn with well-meaning but disastrous policies.

If kids can't behave and sit quiet, put them into sports, lots of sports. Probably in a martial arts class, too! Prevent them from drinking coke and coffee and tea.

I agree! absolutely! The god damn PARENTS should do exactly this ! I do! My kids have been in competitive travel hockey since age 6. (Their idea, btw, so dont start with the parent living vicariously thru the kid, over aggressive sports bullshit.) We've spent a fortune keeping them in the programs, flying them out of state for tournaments and driving them to thousands of practices and games. We invested in them. They have summer jobs. They have chores they must complete every week or their cellphone just magically stops working, or their car just magically lost it's wheels. They have learned the joys of success in being competitive, and they pain of failing to live up to their responsibilities. This is MY job.
Not a teacher!
Not a school administrator!
Not the fucking mayor or some other elected jackass!
It is not the responsibility of every taxpayer to even pay for a person to direct kids to those activities, let alone pay for the activities!
This is MY job, as it is the job of every parent.

Get a damn clue what is wrong with them. And when you are in a teaching position, you god damn care for them and don't kick them out because their parents suck.

You're a fucking idiot if you think anyone is going to suggest booting a kid out of school for occasionally talking in class, or for sometimes doing stupid shit. Every kid no matter how well behaved does that. I'm obviously talking about the kid who is constanatly disruptive, constantly fails to perform, and refuses any assistance to modify behavior or achieve. Yes, ultimately it's the parent's fault. Yes, ultimately its the kid who suffers. But quite frankly, better that kid who is being a jackass than every kid around him who is attempting to get something out of their education.

You are an idiot and I hope you never have kids or are someone caring for other peoples kids.

I am a parent, and I have two very well-behaved, happy, healt

Re:I'd argue we need more humanities

[Dcnjoe60]

When rednecks are being denied employment from jobs they desire, because they're readily identifiable as a redneck;

when rednecks are being denied entry to social clubs and bars they desire entry to, because they're readily identifiable as a redneck;

when rednecks realize that these things are happening, and they actually give a damn: they won't be true rednecks anymore.

The Donkey to Shrek "you don't care what anybody thinks" attitude is central to being a redneck, they don't have to be ignorant of how the label limits them socially, they just have to not care; being proud of it is sort of redneck level 2, flying a big rebel flag on the back of your pickup truck would make level 3.

So, what you area saying is that it is alright to stereotype people into various groups and treat them differently as long as you don't make hiring decisions based on it? BTW, you do realize that the term redneck has nothing to do with the south, but was a derogatory term used against rural people, particularly farmers. It was originally the equivalent of calling a person of color the "N" word. It was, and still is, used to show one's superiority over the person being called it.

How about getting rid of H1B's with that

[Joe_Dragon]

How about getting rid of H1B's with that

Re:How about getting rid of H1B's with that

[Anonymous Coward]

How about getting rid of H1B's with that

He's talking about the children outside of the US.

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.

Re:Why?

[matbury]

I don't think it's so much about cheap labour, probably more about getting people to spend more time on computers and the internet. More consumers for their products and services among the coming generations.

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

[PopeRatzo]

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.

I would suggest that learning to paint and play basketball in the 4th grade will serve you better over your lifetime than learning to code.

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).

Re:Oh for fuck's sake

[dgatwood]

He's wrong, but not for the reason you think. He's wrong because fourth grade is way too late to start teaching kids to code. Computer programming is a language skill, and the later you learn, the harder it is to learn. You're better off teaching them the basics in first or second grade and then building it up a little bit at a time over the next decade.

And everybody ought to learn to paint and play basketball, too, at least a little bit. When I was a kid, we had art and music once a week, we had actual PE during recess some of the time. And so on. Not all of us went on to become artists or basketball players (for example, I only became decent at art when they invented multiple levels of "Undo", and I still can't shoot baskets to save my life), but exposing everyone to those skills early in life means that those who have the natural aptitude for them are more likely to become good at them. And for everyone else, as long as it is enjoyable and failure isn't treated as a mark of shame, there's no harm in teaching a wider range of skills in our schools.

In fact, I'd argue that the worst thing that has happened in our education system in the past couple of decades is the reduction in arts and music education. There's a strong correlation between musicianship and computer programming abilities. Yet for some baffling reason, we keep seeing schools reducing funding for the single most generally accessible way for students to learn the core skills that computer science depends upon:

• The ability to simultaneously interpret something at both a detailed (notes) and at a high level (musicianship)
• Grasp of how complex things are composed of many smaller things, such as individual instrument parts in a large ensemble work, and learning how they all fit together
• Basic algorithmic thinking, such as loops and conditional branching
• Reasoning skills (the sound system doesn't work; let's figure out why)
• Fractions (You can't learn to read music without it, so students who learn music as kids have a huge leg up in math later on.)

and so on. It amazes me that after decades of cuts in music education, suddenly, the tech industry wonders why CS graduation rate is declining. Well, duh. You can't lump computer science in with STEM and expect to get good outcomes. Computer science is not a science, nor is it math.

Sure, there are aspects of science and math in computer science, just as there are aspects of science and math in music—acoustics and psychoaccoustics, metrical division of measures, relationships between frequency and pitch and wavelength, and so on. And sure, when you make music or write code, you have to follow certain rules or it won't compile (performers won't be able to play it). However, on top of that foundation of rules and technical details, there's a huge mountain of artisanship, and that's what makes the difference between someone who does well in CS and someone who doesn't.

Performing music and writing software are closely related skills; composing music and writing computer software are nearly identical skills, and use basically the same parts of the brain in the same way. The difference is that most kids won't get interested in something that looks boring, and they initially see computers as boring. Music doesn't have that problem.

Of course, if we could make programming more fun, that might help, at least a little, but either way, the best way to end up with more programmers is by having more music classes, more art classes, more dance, more theater, more... everything but STEM. There's some irony for you.

Re:Oh for fuck's sake

[PopeRatzo]

Actually, I was a little more serious. In the 4th grade, engaging a visual medium like painting, that requires imagination, observation, etc and a physical activity like a sport, will both make you a more well-rounded, happy individual and give you skills and health that will make you a better coder should you choose to go that way.

You can always learn how to code. Nobody here learned to code in the 4th grade. It's like calculus. It's a tool and you learn it when you need it. But learning art, or music and being physically active makes every day of your life better. And you'll probably be more successful because of it.

Re:Oh for fuck's sake

[PopeRatzo]

There's an oversupply of basketball players and painters.

We're talking about the 4th grade here. You don't paint or play basketball in the 4th grade because you're going to do it for life. You do them because it helps you develop as a human being, unlike coding, which seems to hinder that process given what I've seen here at Slashdot.

Re:Oh for fuck's sake

[AthanasiusKircher]

Nobody here learned to code in the 4th grade.

What do you say that? I did. I have several friends who did as well around that age -- we taught ourselves from manuals available at the time.

It's like calculus. It's a tool and you learn it when you need it

There are elements of calculus that could easily be introduced in elementary school, particularly if we focused on geometrical explanations (which were originally used by people like Newton, and which people like Tom Apostol have been arguing for a long time) instead of the abstract algebraic ones. It would be very helpful to lay the foundation for basic calculus concepts so early, so the elements wouldn't be so foreign when the kids are prepared for the algebraic abstractions later on.

But learning art, or music and being physically active makes every day of your life better. And you'll probably be more successful because of it.

Completely agree. But there's no reason why we can't introduce some concepts earlier. Apps like Lightbot and Scratch Jr. clearly show that one can introduce procedural ideas even to younger kids (earlier than 4th grade), and although I don't have evidence to back this up, I would bet that kids do better at picking up coding concepts for more abstract things later on.

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:Really....

[swb]

This is why we got a letter in the school informing us that our son's standardized test scores in reading and math qualified him for the 'gifted and talented' category but that no programs were available in our school for such a qualification. But there are at least 3 programs at our school dedicated to serving the needs of various categories of hard to educate students.

This is why educated white people and intelligent immigrants abandon urban school districts. All the resources are tied up in the Sisyphean task of trying to get every last impoverished minority from failed families to meet some performance parity with children not from those backgrounds.

Moving some of that money to programs designed to challenge and enrich high achieving students is considered an act of racist white privilege designed to suppress minorities. Those children do just fine with the lowest common denominator curriculum and nothing should be done to further enhance their status position.

I'm not kidding, our own district had a school board member who wanted to block remodeling of a school because the "affluent white students" already "had enough advantages".

Learn to weld.

[darthsilun]

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.

I failed my music class

[somenickname]

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.

Cook is no leader

[SensitiveMale]

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.

Re:Cook is no leader

[The Evil Atheist]

The vast majority of people don't want to code and will never have to code.

And how will they find that out unless they take a few classes? If we approached learning anything only we we become interested in it, then it will never happen because it would be too late by then.

What age did Tim Cook learn to program?

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

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.

People wonder why Trump is winning

[wyattstorch516]

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.

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:I'd argue we need moalready to mucre humanities

[dgatwood]

The schools are already busy teaching kids to be wimpy little fucks, and know-nothings. They don't need to be teaching "humanities" IMO.

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.

Re:It just won't work, and make more trouble later

[dgatwood]

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.

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.

Re:I'd argue we need moalready to mucre humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Why?

[prefec2]

Even if we had computing classes for 4th graders. It would not help. You cannot teach everybody coding. The kids will hate it. It could be even counter productive.

In the past they lured more people into CS courses at university. Most of these extra people drop out or switch to something else. CS is not for everyone. Like engineering and the sciences you need to have a specific mindset for it. If anything would help then it would be training those skills. But I doubt it would significantly increase the output of coders.

BTW in future we will need less coders, as more stuff will be generated automatically.

Don't 'require' it

[Junta]

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.

Re: Why?

[prefec2]

You totally missed my point. I did not say or imply people should not be taught math in school or basic reasoning. Quite the contrary. Kids should learn multiple languages, calculus, critical thinking. Their social development is also very important. Much more important than compulsory coding classes for 4th graders.

Furthermore, we already had programs to engage people with CS in high school and a lot of promises so that parents and kids think it is a great idea to study CS. Since then the number of students increased, but the percentage of people who are able complete a bachelor decreased. Even though the courses are less complicated than they were. This has nothing to do with high horses. It is just an observation. We are not equal in our abilities. Some are better in one thing than in another. There are people who are brilliant and gifted and others are not so gifted. We are very different, but we are all humans and I do not define the worthiness of someone based on his or her abilities. That would be chauvinistic.

Re: Why?

[JoeMerchant]

I write automatic code generators professionally. It keeps me quite busy. Sure, if you put a LOC metric on the output from the generator (and, especially if you count lines every time you run an iteration), it's a beast, cranking out LOC 10 to 1000x faster than a human coder. But, in terms of solving problems, automatic code generators are still solving problems at a human scale pace.

Describe a problem, implement a solution, test the solution, discover problems in the solution (or, as often, in the original problem description), describe those problems, rinse, lather, repeat. Doesn't matter if there are "automatic code generators" in the loop, compilers have been automatically generating code since the 1960s, that hasn't decreased the available programming work, just the level of detail that people work at.

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.