61–70 of 152 posts
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More than music, foreign languages, chemistry, physics.... "English" and "math" are the two things you'll be taking constantly in middle school and high school.
Have they finally gotten rid of "American History"? Thank Goodness.
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> workforce for capitalists Regardless of the reality of capitalism, work must be done in order for people to eat. That work could be actually plowing fields and picking fruit. Preferably, it is building and configuring machines to plow and pick. Public education should be about enriching lives. A large part of that is teaching people the skills they can use to satisfy material needs. All of this remained true under…
Public education is little more than a dumping ground for children, to get them out of the way so their parents can go to work.
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So it's not in a child's interest to prepare them for jobs that pay well?
But the dumbed-down version of science and math you get in K-12 doesn't prepare kids for those jobs anyway. Those people actually going into science and math jobs will learn "real science" and "real math" in college.
People are intelligent in many different ways and I don't believe that most people have the abstract thinking skills necessary to really thrive in computer science. Forcing everybody to take part in computer science education is probably going to frustrate the hell out of most people (make them feel stupid and annoyed at having to do this stuff) and dumb down the curriculum for the small percentage of kids who would…
Most people are not going to be novelists, but all students learn to write. Most people are not going to be mathematicians, but they all learn basic math. Sure, if you are bad at it, it will frustrate you. Go talk to any 10 year old and you will find this is already true for existing subject. Pick any subject - learning it in school doesn't mean you are going to do it for a career, but it is part of education so that…
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The majority of people flail away and struggle to get through the three years of high-school level math they are typically required to take, which usually tops out at some kind of trig/pre-calculus level - which is just about what you'd need to know to be a carpenter who could figure angles and lengths without relying solely on rules-of-thumb. Maybe they take a softball stats class their senior year. Evidence would s…
Maybe they don't, in a way, but are you sure they still don't benefit from it, even if they find it hard and even if they only reach a pre-calculus level?
I've got a couple of friends my age (35) who got into programming in the last few years and absolutely love it, they didn't get into it when they where younger because they didn't have access to the machines (mostly a matter of your background, even the "cheap" home computers in the 80's where not cheap, I was lucky, my parents were not wealthy but my dad had an interest in computers so we had one from 87 onwards nothing spectacular I was still using a 386 in the late 90's, didn't get on windows until ~2000 by which point I was already a Linux user)
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But the dumbed-down version of science and math you get in K-12 doesn't prepare kids for those jobs anyway. Those people actually going into science and math jobs will learn "real science" and "real math" in college.
That's really just an indictment of the implementation, not the idea.
The real problem is not computer science. Everyone in the United States cannot be a programmer - its going to lead to the same problem we have with law, business, etc. Too many graduates leading to labour oversupply. Government will always be slower to respond then markets. So even though right now there is a shortage of programmers - it might not be the case once these student's graduate. So Govt is always one step…
I agree. This just seems like an attempt at a poorly thought-out quick fix. The country has a lot of problems with unemployment/underemployment, so they're fixating on to one job category that's "hot" with a high pay/education ratio as the solution.
But since the real solution is to do something effective about economic inequality, misguided quick fixes are what we're going to get.
Plus, the more CS grads, the more competition for jobs, and the less they have to be paid and the more disposably they can be treated. I'm sure big employers are salivating over that just like they do over an increase in the H1-B quota.
You don't need much equipment to teach CS. Basic machines will do. And there is no need to spend any money on software these days (f/oss). I worry that this money is less an educational initiative and more a handout to those companies who sell services to schools. Which organizations are behind this pledge?
I don't believe there is any shortage of computer science talent. I believe there is only a shortage of students graduating with CS degrees from schools like Stanford and MIT which is what many employers are looking for. NACE figures really seem to indicate we don't need more junior level programmers as 42.5% of graduating seniors majoring in CS did not have a full time job offer (not even in unrelated fields) at the…