It’s the freedom to turn what you know into anything you want

hyperbolic today, are we? i thoroughly endorse the benefits of learning programming at some level, but this might be overstating those benefits just a bit, don’t you think?

It will be.

It will be.

Anyone can draw, anyone can program and anyone can do math. 

Sure they may not be a Michelangelo or Turing,  but they with a good amount of effort and a little time will be better than the people who consider themselves to be good at it. 

And as if that wasn’t enough, you can code for food and basically anything you’d ever want, you just need to be able to deliver what someone else wants.

When you write a program, it generally doesn’t work. And to get it to work, you can’t scream at it, bully it, manipulate it, blame it (or anyone else). You have to UNDERSTAND what the program is really doing (and how that differs from what you THOUGHT you told it to do), and FIX it. You can ask others for help, you can apply scientific method  (another useful skill), and you can learn from your mistakes.

It defeats helplessness, and it teaches that magical explanations are bullshit, and underlying every mysterious physical phenomenon are understandable physical explanations.

Astronomers say everyone should learn astronomy in school, so we might know our place in the universe. Biologists say we all must learn biology, so we might appreciate nature.  Chemists say we must all learn chemistry, so that we might better understand our modern world.  Farmers say we should all learn agriculture, so we might know where our food comes from.  Mechanics thinks kids should learn how to change their brakes in school because it will help them be better car owners.  Literature people think everyone should read more, film people think there should be film classes, etc etc on and on.

Heck, there was even a lady on TTBOOK.org (radio show) last weekend talking about how learning penmenship is the key to kids learning.

The problem is THERE IS NO TIME to do this.  There is about 5.5 hours of time a day in school to learn things.  (You could argue that we need longer or more school days.)  

Mostly though no one wants to pay for it.  Finding pols and citizens who want more money for education are easy to find.  Find a politician who is going to raise taxes 10% for education. Find a citizen who feels they can afford a few grand more a year in taxes.

I hate this state.

How about teaching everybody how to perform minor surgeries?

Your health insurance company sends out that self-care manual every year, too?

I know geniuses that work on motorcycles, but I never hear anyone refer to them as a “motorcycle genius”. Working with computers doesn’t necessarily make you a “computer genius” or any kind of genius at all. I wish more professional programmers knew that.

Program Or Be Programmed

I learned to code because I could do anything with the machine

Really?  You can grow food by coding?  Build a shelter?  Transport yourself?

Many elementary and secondary schools already have supplementary “computer classes” outside of the normal curricular subjects, but those largely teach receptive skills rather than productive ones (playing edutainment games, using MSOffice, etc.). Those could be more extensively retooled to incorporate programming, I think, since the types of skills and literacies associated with programming fall more explicitly within the curricular aims of those classes.

Writing software is equally empowering in a social sense. A really useful piece of software can be made by basically anyone, alone or in a group, and deeply loved by millions of people. People who just weren’t even on the table before are real players now, and the final product can be grabbed onto by anyone or everyone in the community.

It might, for some, but for the millions of others it was a waste of their time inflicted on them against their will.

Like science and history (two of my favorite subjects), the kind of basic programming concepts you describe above should be taught in high school to every kid who’s interested in learning them.  But lots of kids won’t be interested in learning them and most of those kids will go on to lead perfectly fulfilling and happy lives.

Because what kids “should” learn is highly subjective and the kids know it better than the adults ever have.

The idea that some new kind of language or interface will magically enable all and any non-programmers to program has been repeatedly advanced in the past.  If you are old enough you will remember COBOL being hyped in exactly that way.  The problem is that programming necessarily involves breaking a problem down into very tiny parts that do not look at all like the problem and then putting them together to solve the problem, just as with drawings one creates the illusion of the subject with little marks that look nothing like the subject but are almost miraculously brought together by the draftsman.  For many people, these are procedures that have long since been banished to the unconscious mind and can’t be easily recovered, if at all.  A new language does about as much for coding as a new kind of pencil does for drawing.

Young people should certainly be learning how to use computers and other gadgets of our age and culture, but they can almost certainly do this without learning to program.  If they can learn it, great, but I don’t see the point of torturing those who can’t.

As for the idea that learning to program, to draw, to speak Russian, etc., will necessarily lead to a job, I think that’s pretty dubious.  I’d like to see some evidence from the bloody fields of the job market. 

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-true-that-not-everyone-can-be-a-programmer/

Anecdotally, I find that some people who are quite smart, curious, creative, and easily able to pick up knowledge and craft in many other areas, still don’t seem to have whatever it takes to really *understand* programming except at a very mechanical, simplistic level.  It does not seem to be a lack of either critical thinking or abstract thinking; it’s more like they’re trying to find their way around without having any sense of direction.