Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you want to teach kids problem solving skills, logic, breaking down a problem, etc. then that makes much more sense as it is applicable in many areas of life but spending an hour a week for several months teaching a kid how to make a little game in Python isn't really going to benefit them at all in the long run in my opinion. I'm willing to bet it will do more good for 90% of them than learning about Chemical Bo…
as I understand you, you think learning a programming language will do more good for 90% of students than being exposed to chemistry, physics, algebra, history, literature, and whatever other nonesense, which I take you to mean other things commonly studied in high school like art, psychology, a foreign language, economics, etc. where, may I ask, did you ever hear about Hooke's law, chemical bonds, quadratics or Kakf…
>If you weren't the recipient of such an education, you couldn't prove your point.
Or I could have just googled "spring physics" as that's one of the few things I vaguely remember from highschool, named Kafka because that's one of the only two books I've actually read before deciding literature is boring/waste of time, chemical bonds - the same thing as "spring physics" and quadratics I actually needed in my day job which is why I said 90% - this kind of knowledge can be easily acquired if you need it.
Majority of that "multi-faceted" 4 year curriculum ended up being a waste of time, and ironically I am probably in the top % of my peers in the amount of knowledge I retained.
On the other hand basic programming is about as enabling as knowing how to do basic probability calculations or writing in formal tone. I never argued about first order logic or learning reasoning so I don't know why you're bringing that argument up - I said that basic programming lets you do stuff that's useful in majority of office work - it helps analyze/transform/collect data and interact with software in a more productive manner. You don't even need to learn programming just going trough the process should give you some insight so when you encounter a problem you can know what to search for and go trough the motions to use an existing solution (eg. knowing how to run a script you downloaded because you know what a script is and what it's supposed to do, or knowing how to modify some formula/query even if you couldn't write it from scratch)