A couple of weeks ago, President Obama engaged in a Google+ Hangout in which he invited questions from his fellow…Hangers?… Hangers-On?… Googlers? Okay, let’s just call them fellow Americans, in the time-honored tradition of U.S. politicians.
The question that caught our attention came from a young woman who wanted to know what President Obama thought about making computer programming language courses mandatory in high school. It would the same as requiring students to study a foreign language, she said.
The President thought it was a very good idea, indeed. He commented that requiring programming courses would help equip American students to better compete in a global high-tech economy. He suggested that we could interest students in programming by showing them how understanding programming languages would help them create their own computer games. The role model he used was Mark Zuckerberg, who, according to Obama, taught himself programming so he could design his own games. Zuckerberg, of course, went on to create Facebook, which, despite its rather checkered reputation, has created a lot of jobs and wealth, even if one could argue that it has created little of any lasting value for our culture.
Now computer games are a lot of fun for some kids, but are they really important for most students? How many high school girls, for example, are interested enough in computer games to try to design their own? For that matter, how many students of any gender truly wish to write their own computer games when it is so much easier to download the same ones that all their friends are playing?
And is it really necessary for absolutely everyone to know a computer programming language? According to one estimate, as of 2011, there were more than four million jobs in the core IT industry in the United States. Sounds like a lot, right? But according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are approximately 150 million workers in the U.S. So only about 3 percent of U.S. workers are engaged in IT jobs. And note, not all of those 4 million jobs require any coding at all.
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It is true that most jobs require workers to use computers in one way or another. But using Word or PowerPoint or Excel or any one of a myriad of other programs that run our businesses, does not require any coding or understanding of code at all. Even sophisticated web sites can now be created without writing a single line of HTML. So one can argue that it would be more useful to teach specific software than to teach coding in high school.
If the government does require coding courses in high school, what language would be taught? There are so many niche programming languages, that one would be hard put to decide which ones would be most useful for the most students. And, as anyone in the IT world knows, the hot languages change all the time. Computer programs and their languages can have a very short shelf life. When I took Russian in high school, I didn’t have to worry that Russian would be obsolete by the time I entered college.
It does seem sensible to teach computer basics as part of a general science course. And programming languages should be offered as electives, most efficiently by cooperating with local tech schools and community colleges. But in an age of increasingly limited resources, American schools would be wise to focus those resources on core subjects.
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