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Could anything like this ever happen in the UK?
And a "technical" school getting anyone into oxbridge mm that will be the day.
I'm not convinced by the idea of heavily specialised high schools. At that age you should be discovering what you're passionate about, and sampling a wide range of subjects. The focus here seems to be more on training kids up for a job - would anyone be so enthusiastic if we replaced "software engineering" with "assembly line work" or "street sweeping"?
The thing is, those aren't fair comparisons. Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage. This is just a reaction to that demand. In addition, software engineering is a very flexible field. You can engineer under or tangentially to almost any position or field and be a part of what makes those things interesting. Assembly line worker and street sweeper are not so similarly blessed.
When I was in high school, teachers were in exceedingly high demand. Because of this, teaching was a career highlighted often by our teachers.
The result is that most of my friends ended up choose teaching careers; along with a significant number of others in my age group. I have watched my friends really struggle to find work in the field and a couple have even chosen to leave the field altogether because there are far more people than jobs now.
Anyway, the point is that being forcefully reactive to the problem of career demands is never a good idea. You will just end up with a bunch of highly trained people who are unable to use those skills. I do not believe that software development is immune to this fact: Both teaching and programming are skills that are useful everywhere, but it still didn't help my friends.
The market will naturally sort itself out. As pay for programers rises, more people will become interested in the field until the pay declines again. The influx becomes manageable this way. Any additional incentives will cause the problems above. It is best to not mess with the market.
I'm not sure it's a great idea to get so focused at such an early age. There's a lot to learn about the world when you're 14, and it might be good to explore a wide range of topics. (I personally took most of my "real" classes in high school, so by the time I got to college, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. After going to college for a year, I realized my needs would not be met in that way. But deciding at 20 is…
Yes you do need to have a wider range than just CS In fact a lot of what industy needs is more Computer Enginering and lees hyper secpecialised CS majors - you dont see Audi or Mercedes saying we need engineers lets train a load of physicists.
http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/13/10142795...
I'm not convinced by the idea of heavily specialised high schools. At that age you should be discovering what you're passionate about, and sampling a wide range of subjects. The focus here seems to be more on training kids up for a job - would anyone be so enthusiastic if we replaced "software engineering" with "assembly line work" or "street sweeping"?
It's not like the kids are being forced to go into this school. If you graduate at 18 and decided you don't want to be a programmer that's still plenty of time to do something else and having some knowledge of programming is going to be useful in just about any field.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they learn to engineer software, surely they'll know how to access Wikipedia.
Learning how to accumulate facts is a completely different problem than learning how to think about ideas. I think teaching children how to think about things is far more important than focusing on specific skills at that age, even if they are useful skills.
I'm not sure it's a great idea to get so focused at such an early age. There's a lot to learn about the world when you're 14, and it might be good to explore a wide range of topics. (I personally took most of my "real" classes in high school, so by the time I got to college, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. After going to college for a year, I realized my needs would not be met in that way. But deciding at 20 is…
Yes you do need to have a wider range than just CS In fact a lot of what industy needs is more Computer Enginering and lees hyper secpecialised CS majors - you dont see Audi or Mercedes saying we need engineers lets train a load of physicists.
Also, your Audi/Mercedes analogy is flawed. Physicists and engineers are very different, and if they needed more engineers, they would sponsor engineering schools. Right now we need more software developers, so training kids in Computer Science makes complete sense. Some schools (including my alma mater) do provide a separate Software Engineering degree, but they generally overlap so much with CS as to be virtually indistinguishable. It's also somewhat laughable to call Software Engineering "engineering", as there is a general lack of rigor and no formal qualification for software engineers like there is for every other branch of engineering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they learn to engineer software, surely they'll know how to access Wikipedia.
Education not only teaches facts, but efficiently exposes a person to unknown unknowns. I'd argue that a student-teacher conversation is more efficient at exposing a student to an unknown unknown, than Wikipedia would be.
Could anything like this ever happen in the UK?
Probaly not they wouldnt get 5 good GSCES which have to include english so school would be put in special needs and the head and 80% of the staff woudl be fired. And a "technical" school getting anyone into oxbridge mm that will be the day.
Could anything like this ever happen in the UK?
Probaly not they wouldnt get 5 good GSCES which have to include english so school would be put in special needs and the head and 80% of the staff woudl be fired. And a "technical" school getting anyone into oxbridge mm that will be the day.
tl;dr We're part of the technical school district, yet we are one of the schools with the highest Ivy acceptance rates.
Could anything like this ever happen in the UK?
Probaly not they wouldnt get 5 good GSCES which have to include english so school would be put in special needs and the head and 80% of the staff woudl be fired. And a "technical" school getting anyone into oxbridge mm that will be the day.