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Disney Thinks High Schools Should Let Kids Take Coding In Place of Foreign Languages
theodp writes:
Florida lawmakers are again proposing a contentious plan that would put coding and foreign language on equal footing in a public high school student's education. Under a proposed bill students who take two credits of computer coding and earn a related industry certification could then count that coursework toward two foreign language credits.
"I sort of comically applaud that some would want to categorize coding as a foreign language," said Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. "Coding cannot be seen as an equivalent substitute." Disclosure records show that Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has three lobbyists registered to fight in support of the bill. Disney did not return an email seeking comment, but State Senator Jeff Brandes said the company's interest is in a future workforce... Disney has provided signature tutorials for the nation's Hour of Code over the past three years, including Disney's Frozen princess-themed tutorial.
"I sort of comically applaud that some would want to categorize coding as a foreign language," said Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. "Coding cannot be seen as an equivalent substitute." Disclosure records show that Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has three lobbyists registered to fight in support of the bill. Disney did not return an email seeking comment, but State Senator Jeff Brandes said the company's interest is in a future workforce... Disney has provided signature tutorials for the nation's Hour of Code over the past three years, including Disney's Frozen princess-themed tutorial.
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Coding is not for everyone and not everyone will gain even a modest benefit from learning coding. Furthermore this shit is going to be highly automated over the coming decade or two. We need to teach kids stuff to make them well rounded, not just a fucking outdated cog.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Do companies and billionerds really think this "teach everyone to code" is going to produce a more capable workforce? What's their angle - drive wages down?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Seriously, it's a brilliant idea to replace math with coding, because computer science is technically applied mathematics, and everyone already hates math, but everyone hopes to bullshit their way to a billion dollars as a coder.
So, if you look at the foreign language requirement for what it is (an "expand your mind" requirement), then it is plainly obvious that coding achieves the same objective.
Joel Spolsky,in his rant on Java Schools, sort of touches on this:
Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not because they served any purpose, but because they were sort of considered an obvious requirement for educated people. In some sense my argument is no different that the argument made by the pro-Latin people (all four of them). âoe[Latin] trains your mind. Trains your memory. Unraveling a Latin sentence is an excellent exercise in thought, a real intellectual puzzle, and a good introduction to logical thinking,â writes Scott Barker. But I canâ(TM)t find a single university that requires Latin any more. Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?
Granted, he is arguing for CS students always having to learn fundamental CS concepts like pointers and recursion, but I think that it is not too much of a stretch to think that coding will eventually become the Latin and Greek of our culture. Everybody should have to learn a bit of it if they want to consider themselves well educated and well rounded, and a small number will choose to specialize in it as a field of endeavor.
And if you are thinking to yourself, "Well, what's the point, they won't remember any of it?" Please go find any random middle aged person whose only exposure to foreign language was their 2 year requirement in high school and ask them how much Spanish, French, German, etc. they remember? Hint: their high school foreign language class didn't make them an expert in the foreign language, so would two years of programming in high school be seen as any less valuable from a macro-pedagogic perspective?
I've done the same twice basically.
Ohio has a "State Honors Diploma" that requires 6 out of 7 criteria: 4 yrs Math, English, Science, 3yrs Social Studies, Foreign Language, 27 on the ACT (or some # I forget on SAT), 3.5+ GPA (there might be/have been 1 more criteria but either way you could only lose out on 1) ... And I got my state honors diploma by getting 27 on the ACT (and pissing off my '"guidance counselor" by proving her wrong and actually qualifying b/c she was a cunt... and pushed people to Foreign Languages....(I suspect some kind of bonus pay program... but I digress...)
Then skip a few years later....
I signed up for Japanese and then the next year they didn't offer it, so my only hope (I've had issues with foreign languages since middle school) was to register as 'disabled' due to having ADHD, and get them to waive Foreign Language requirement.(I never bothered to sign up before with the school (I had to take IQ test, and other tests to have their doctors agree that I was ADHD) because I don't -personally- consider myself disabled...
I already had a full ride offer from UC Berkeley, U of Illinois Champaign/Urbana, and Vanderbilt University for their CS Program, was in the honors program (took additional classes and did additional work and was ready to get summa cum laude on top of that... but was missing a Foreign Language credit...
Long story short... I got a waiver, the next year the Dean of the STEM college used me as an example of "foreign language is a great skill, but not one everyone should need for STEM field" and they changed the entire policy for the STEM college.
I would LOVE to be able to learn a foreign language... but it is unbelievably hard for me... (I start to forget new words after the first 500 or so) and am HIGHLY functional without it. (I've also tried to learn Spanish for 4 years, Japanese for 2, Chinese for 1... with no luck... to see if maybe it was just an issue with one of the languages... to no avail...)
Now... should Foreign Language be a -requirement- for high school students... No, It should be offered, and even encouraged, but not required. I'll be the first to sing the praises of knowing more languages. But we should just drop the requirement and also add in basic computer literacy and usage (including some basic coding) ... But I don't think they should be tied together. They are both worth doing... but I'm a perfect example of someone who can code in a couple dozen programming languages but isn't good with foreign languages.... (Programming languages generally only have ~50 keywords and often they are the same "if, goto, while, case, etc."
They're not going to give them any jobs.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Why does it have to be either/or? Why can't kids learn Spanish AND Python?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Too many languages anyway. Just standardize on ASCII and insist on English. Problem solved. Many problems solved.
Just look at Slashdot: We never have to put up with any non-English here (well, except for TFSs, but that's just because the editors are illiterate) because the Slashcode, it doesn't truck with nasty shit like Unicode or UTF-8 or whatever.
You want bullets, or special currency symbols, or Chinese? No. Not gonna have any. (No editing your posts, either, get your damned stuff 100% right the first time, like every programmer does, see?) And no pictures. As we all know, pictures are worth a thousand words, and every post would be worth more than TFS, so none of that here. Write it, don't sight it.
So yeah, teach em English and ASCII and let 'em loose on the world.
Serve the bloody world right for letting us elect Trump, anyway.
Besides, 7-bit text should be enough for anyone. My Televideo terminal is still 100% good with ASCII. If those dimweasels hadn't stopped putting RS-232 ports on computers, I'd still be using it.
ATH0, bitches.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So, if you look at the foreign language requirement for what it is (an "expand your mind" requirement), then it is plainly obvious that coding achieves the same objective.
Isn't that the entire point of school, though? So pretty much anything goes, as long as it's taught in the school system?
Software engineering can substitute for a foreign language in much the same way that home economics can substitute for economics.
Our education system should not be strictly utilitarian. While I can see value in exposing everyone to code - or, perhaps, teaching some form of technical literacy - it shouldn't be in place of foreign language. If we're going to do that, it should be along side of the foreign language requirement.
The point of learning foreign languages is, at least in part, to teach you about the world - to help you discover that not everyone is like you, and not everyone shares the same culture. Maybe the language itself doesn't stick with you forever, but the stories and life lessons hopefully do.
Expanding your mind in this context does not mean improving your intellect... it's about helping you improve as a human being.
This is why I'm leery when techies try to "improve" education. Their focus is usually so narrow, they don't seem to see what might be lost if they're not careful. They often seem completely unable to see the big picture. Heck, Bill Gates never thought about much of anything outside of Microsoft until Melinda came along - watch some old Almost Live episodes (an old Seattle-based comedy show) from pre-1995, and you'll see a fair number of barbs regarding his (and other Softies) lack of involvement in the community.
#DeleteChrome
Of the people who know Latin, only the idiots who didn't learn enough of it to read well ever say that one needs to learn Latin as an intellectual puzzle. The rest of us appreciate the ability to pick up and read literary (and scientific and historical) texts from medieval and early modern Europe (and dissertations up to the early twentieth century from some European universities) no matter what the nationality or native tongue of the author. The surviving Latin-language output of the sixteenth century alone is two or three orders of magnitude (yes, really) the size of all the literature surviving from the ancient world, and most of it was never translated into English. You don't learn Latin to learn a puzzle: you learn it as a key to unlocking vast libraries of literature that most people don't know ever existed. There's a long, eighteenth-century epic poem (the Rusticatio Mexicana) on the hardworking people of Mexico and their oppression by Europeans. There are treatises on state action against non-state actors (like Grotius' De iure piratarum) that still have an impact on international law and the controversial idea of treating terrorists as hostes humani generis. There are histories of the Americas, Africa, Asia, even the early Jesuit visits to China and Japan, all in Latin, and not translated into English. When you learn Latin well enough actually to read it, without puzzling over it or needing a dictionary, you open yourself up to being able to discover vast swaths of human intellect and history to which you have no access otherwise.
I studied foreign languages, Latin in High School, German in college. I also was stationed in Japan in the Navy and tried to learn Japanese (with much more success than I ever had with Latin or German.)
I also learned how to program a computer. My first experience of that, Fortran on a PDP 8 in 1966, was pretty bad. But, after the Navy, I tried again and got pretty good at it. (Mostly programming in assembly and C.)
What the two disciplines have in common is a basic sort of new kind of mental activity that probably is good exercise for the brain in the way that physical exercise is good for the muscles.
The big advantage that teaching programming might have in my opinion, is that you can tell whether you're really learning it or not. A lot of language teaching is woefully incompetent, and nobody seems to care. (Maybe they care, but they say 'What can we do?' with a shrug.) With computers though, the program you write either works or it doesn't. And there's no ambiguous subjective interpretation of whether it works or not. That's a good educational experience for anybody who can handle the initial frustration. So yeah, it's probably not so bad to teach programming instead of foreign languages. Especially if they start out with assembly, so the student can actually see where the rubber meets the road. (But how many people can teach assembly language?)
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Your mind doesn't exist in one dimension. So anything that "expands your mind" isn't necessarily a suitable replacement for something else that "expands your mind".
Greek and Latin are valuable because they give you access to the mind and thoughts of other people. The same for foreign languages. Programming languages don't do that, except in a very narrow domain.
The failure of US language instruction is due to a stubborn unwillingness to change. We've known for fifty years or more that human language acquisition ability rapidly fades at adolescence, and yet we continue to to insist on waiting until adolescence to teach kids foreign language.
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Work coding into math courses, if not, out right replace some. There has to be a way to teach programming that allows for students to also pick up all of the concepts taught in algebra courses.
Would the elite in this country stand for it being done in the prestigious prep schools they send their offspring to? If not, it's no good for your kids either.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So, if you look at the foreign language requirement for what it is (an "expand your mind" requirement)
"Expand your mind"? That's really vague. Just a few things foreign language requirements help with that coding doesn't:
-- English grammar and usage. Many good writers and speakers have noted that they first really understand grammar and details of English usage when they study a foreign language. Now, of course it's possible to refine one's language use without formal grammar training, but the process of deconstructing a foreign language is often helpful to understand one's own.
-- English etymology and vocabulary use. Particularly if one studies Latin-based language like Spanish, French, or Italian, one gains knowledge of Latinate roots, which are often helpful in figuring out Latin-based English words. Frequently in the first few years of language instruction, you'll learn a lot more English vocabulary through relationships with the other language. Germanic languages also are helpful in learning new English words, due to common older roots.
-- Communication skills. A lot of students who just take a couple years of a language in high school or whatever don't really get a proficient speaking level, but that's largely due to lack of practice and subsequent failure to "keep up" the training. Nevertheless, for many students who do take the oral skills seriously, languages like Spanish can be incredibly helpful for communicating with customers/users and other job contacts in many professions. If you have an opportunity, doing something like Mandarin or Japanese can open yet other doors.
-- As one learns another language, generally one learns about other cultures too. Which again is often an introspective exercise in learning about your own culture -- you don't realize your assumptions about the word often until you contrast them with someone else's. This can be a very eye-opening exercise for young people.
None of this is an argument against coding. But there are more specific things language requirements do, aside from basic skills in that language or "expanding your mind" (whatever that means).
I think that it is not too much of a stretch to think that coding will eventually become the Latin and Greek of our culture.
Huh. I'm not sure even how to begin responding to this. The reason Latin and Greek were taught in schools commonly until the mid-20th century is because they not only served as a common communication system in many fields, were the basis of many modern languages, and were the most common languages of historical documents over a span of more than 2000 years, but also were the foundation of much of Western culture and political systems. There's still a vast amount of classical, medieval, and early modern literature unavailable in translation -- and when I saw "literature" I mean all documents, including scientific and technical advances, as well as cultural artifacts.
While I'm not arguing for a return to Latin or Greek requirements, I don't think it's a coincidence that the U.S. government started wildly straying from the original restrictions on federal power in the early to mid 20th century as knowledge of Latin/Greek and related Roman/Greek history (and political science) decreased. Sure, it's possible to read about these things in English in translation, but the widespread use of Latin led to a promotion of related cultural knowledge (see above), including political and philosophical questions. The Founders of the U.S. all knew their history very well and designed our government in various ways to prevent recurrence of problems that happened in ancient societies. All of this is largely forgotten these days, at best a marginal sidenote to history courses in many public school curricula.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Latin and Greek had even more benefits for learning about E
It is laughable that people talk of it being an 'either/or' thing. In the modern world, people need a grasp of foreign languages, since people need to talk to people; people need a grasp of programming, so that computers are not so much 'magic black boxes with flashing lights'; and people need to grasp the languages of maths and science. Figuring out how to teach people, and get across why grokking these things is a good idea, is a research project nobody at the top of the education seems to want to take fully take on.
Most people need to learn how their "magic black box" works about as much as they need to learn how their "vroom-vroom" engine works, which is why most people have no fucking desire to learn programming or auto repair. That's what they pay other people for.
It's laughable that you think the average layman needs a grasp of programming when 1% of computer users hold that skill today, which doesn't seem to affect their ability to operate a "magic black box". We've been studying how to teach humans for a very long time. One truth has come out of that; not everyone is cut out for learning advanced shit.
I took Spanish in high school which allowed me to get an awesome job as a programmer in Miami in a Cuban company when I was 18. Somehow I see Florida as a place where Spanish should be mandatory from 1st grade for all kids. If you pretend like Spanish is a foreign language in Florida, you're an idiot.
In the rich world that is necessarily intertwined with widespread automated labor, there is always work available for people willing to provide skilled craft and artwork.
The rich people who want, like Scrooge McDuck, to do nothing but swim in their money bin, are rare to the point of fiction. The real rich want to spend their money on quality goods and services. If they have the machines that make goods and do services, eventually they will have all those that can be made by machines, and will want human-made things. Life goes on.
Some of the rich also want challenges, and some want to elevate mankind in general. They also will figure out how to create jobs for those who would otherwise be unemployed.
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