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Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

nytimes.com

161–170 of 191 posts

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#161

It is clearly not a foreign language, but it might honestly be a better substitute for most students' time. In the US, a foreign language can be a great thing to learn, but with our failing math and science teachings, perhaps shifting towards CS instead might be a good idea for helping many high school kids prepare for a STEM dominated job market. From the article: "It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief tha…

Oh noes an old school media publisher prefers people like them with an English lit degree from an Ivy or Oxbridge.

I am shocked shocked to find C P Snows two nation divide in effect at the NYT

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#162
post #155
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fashionable to dismiss the humanities today, but we're not talking about Latin here. Speaking Spanish or Mandarin or Hindi is tremendously practical and opens up a wider range of opportunity than learning to code. CS is great, but it's not for everyone, even those who do pursue CS can benefit from being able to communicate with more people.

It is somewhat practical if there is no opportunity cost, but there is an opportunity cost. Four years of a normal class is nothing. If you devote 4 hours per day for a decade, sure... but that is a lot of time that could be better used for so many other things. Then, OK, so you learned Mandarin but it turns out you need Hindi. Oops. All that time was wasted because you incorrectly guessed which language (of hundreds…

And English is one of the national Languages of India any way

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had very early access to formal logic training Can you please expand on this? Montessori School?

No. I am simply lucky to have been born into a family of Russian Intelligentsia who could provide me with a real education. In 1st grade, I enjoyed learning math too much, and the teacher found this disruptive, so the school found an excuse to get me classified as learning disabled and put me in special education where I spent all day isolated in a detached cottage with 2 teachers and no other students. The teachers…

Thanks for the detail, it seems like you and your mother were able to "home school" yourself inside the school system.

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I am simply lucky to have been born into a family of Russian Intelligentsia who could provide me with a real education. In 1st grade, I enjoyed learning math too much, and the teacher found this disruptive, so the school found an excuse to get me classified as learning disabled and put me in special education where I spent all day isolated in a detached cottage with 2 teachers and no other students. The teachers…

Thanks for the detail, it seems like you and your mother were able to "home school" yourself inside the school system.

Yep, precisely that.

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#165
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I passed high school Spanish through the third year at a top-50 California public school. Later when visiting Argentina people found my speech near-incomprehensible, and I could barely get the gist of a typical newspaper story. That was a couple decades later and it's not nothing, but it was nowhere near worth the time it took. If you're genuinely motivated to learn a language you can do a much better job (and I did,…

You're correct, but the same thing can be said about any grade school subject. Grade school and a lot of undergraduate work are often about breadth, and you'll never know where your interests lie and how you'll want to apply your knowledge to a career until you have some exposure. Inevitably, some percentage of people taking math in high school will become engineers, mathematicians, or scientists. Some percentage of…

I agree with almost all of that -- but it's not okay to waste people's time with lots of required classes. Compulsory schooling has some benefit, mostly in the basic three R's, outweighed by the costs the further you get from that core. (Among the costs are making a lot of people reflexively hate/disdain subjects they might've liked by coming to them more naturally in their own time. In this case I didn't hate Spanish, it wasn't worse than average for school, but that's saying little.)

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#166

It is clearly not a foreign language, but it might honestly be a better substitute for most students' time. In the US, a foreign language can be a great thing to learn, but with our failing math and science teachings, perhaps shifting towards CS instead might be a good idea for helping many high school kids prepare for a STEM dominated job market. From the article: "It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief tha…

It makes me sad how little we value education beyond gainful employment.

It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#167
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fine arts are great, after you've put food on the table and a roof over your head. Most people are much happier to have stable employment than esoteric knowledge. The economy and society are better for it too. School's primary purpose is to prepare people to be functioning members of society.

It's sad that people equate employment to being "functioning members of society." Your job is just one thing you do in society. Education is about teaching children how to think, communicate, and act as much as giving them specific tools for future careers. Never mind the plethora of studies that have found links between arts education and performance in other educational/vocational areas. It's hardly esoteric.

Correlation or causation?

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#168
post #136

It's funny. In one of my first just-out-of-college jobs I worked at a company where "the IT guys" were definitely not at the forefront of the company. However research staff were awarded bonuses or pay differentials if they knew a foreign language even a little bit. I argued, somewhat successfully, that the time and effort it takes to become "native" at a programming language was comparable to a human language...and…

Learning a human language is not "hard" in the way that rocket science is "hard". Almost anyone can learn a language and many of the least smart people in the world are adept in at least one human language. That might be obvious. We all speak at least one language because we learned it in childhood.

What's less obvious is that learning a second language is not "harder" than learning a first language -- at least in the way that learning rocket science is "harder" than learning a card game. Language is not difficult. It's has evolved in the way that it has precisely because that's the way we think already.

However, learning a human language is "hard" in that human languages are huge. Normal adult proficiency for a college graduate is over 20,000 word families. There are about 1500 common grammatical structures. The combination of idiomatic phrases for a fluent speaker is mind boggling.

Learning a language is not complicated -- it's a grind. People fail to learn human languages not because they lack the ability to learn a language, but rather because they are unable or unwilling to simply put in the time and effort. It takes the average human child 12-18 years of full time study and practice to get to adult level proficiency and fluency in their first language. You can do it considerably faster for subsequent languages if you know how, but this is really the benchmark you should compare against.

Computer languages, in comparison, are "harder" to understand, but are orders of magnitude smaller. We're not talking 30% as big here, we're talking 0.01% as big. I don't think the task is in any way comparable.

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me sad how little we value education beyond gainful employment.

It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.

That's a thing that you say that you don't really believe, because there are obvious other goals for mandatory public education; for instance, instilling our civic values.

Re: Code is not a foreign language, and high schools shouldn't treat it that way

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me sad how little we value education beyond gainful employment.

It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.

Really? Trade school is what you think of when it comes the reason for public education?

That seems outside the normal experience & expectations of public school in the USA. Here it seems like language, civics, and basic skills are the job.

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