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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 We need to teach kids stuff to make them well rounded, not just a fucking outdated cog.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
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?
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?
Yes.
The false equivalence I keep seeing on Slashdot is they think that this aimed to turn out more professional coders and they're scared someone is going to come after their niche CS jobs.
I'm a mechanical engineer that can code. You can pat yourself on the back that your job is never going to be taken over by me, nor would I want it. However I do code 40 hours a week, what gives? I use coding to automate mechanical engineering work. At times it get used as a Maslow's hammer, but it gets the job done faster than sitting and doing it manually or throwing a hundred interns on a project.
Latest party trick is to use CNNs to classify plots. 10 years ago I'd make a dozen plots and my boss, I and a few co-workers would study them in a meeting and go "aha, that plot means X". But with the amount of data we're collecting and the amount of plots we're making it'd take a full, tedious week of analyzing them. So I'm treating it as a picture and throwing a spare GPU at it. Inefficient? Probably. Not the ideal solution? Probably Not. Does it work? Yes. But it's fast and I can teach my boss and co-workers how to classify something a handful of times and let the machine do it forever beyond that.
This initiative isn't to turn out more coders, it's to turn out more ____ that can code. Small Business Accountants are still doing voodoo with Excel to automate their jobs, just a tiny amount of Python would make them much, much more efficient and productive. This is across the board of professions. Just like years ago someone got the smart idea to teach students how to type even though companies were employing typists at that time to do that. Turns out it's much faster to just have a person type up what they want themselves than spend the time trying to get a typist to do it.
And the jobs that require a full CS degree are still going to be there, they aren't going anywhere, you can stop freaking out every time we want to teach kids something new. I do expect to see "Python" along side "MS Word" when it comes to most job requirements in the next few decades.
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.
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.
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