Name: Anonymous 2017-12-13 12:01
https://theconversation.com/taking-a-second-look-at-the-learn-to-code-craze-86597
It's amazing how much emphasis American schools put on teaching children to kode while not understanding an ounce of what that consists of. The irony is that (in trying to attempt) teaching everyone to program, there's no particular benefit to most students, in part because they would rather teach children about using worthless proprietary software that's going to be deprecated in two years than teach something universal like simple markup or assembly or basic computer logic. The point is, kids hardly benefit from these kind of efforts, but it sure feeds a lot of money to computer companies while getting students hooked on their products. Too bad their software is nearly always fundamentally different by the time they reach the work force. Laypeople seem terminally scared of anything programming related, even if it's something simple like LaTeX, yet they have no qualms wasting an entire year learning to use a certain program if it has a polished GUI.
When I was a child, I took three consecutive computer science classes before giving up entirely. In each of them, they taught me how to use the Microsoft Office suite. All three of them, over and over again with no progression. The same thing happened to me the CS class I took in community college. To this day, I still don't remember how to write those stupid Excel macros. I would literally ditch computer science class to read programming manuals in the school library (note that the library itself didn't have any manuals of note, I would read them online on the school computers). If it weren't for the fact that you would be expelled if you were to ditch too many classes, I probably would have done it every day, and I would have been better off doing so.
It's amazing how much emphasis American schools put on teaching children to kode while not understanding an ounce of what that consists of. The irony is that (in trying to attempt) teaching everyone to program, there's no particular benefit to most students, in part because they would rather teach children about using worthless proprietary software that's going to be deprecated in two years than teach something universal like simple markup or assembly or basic computer logic. The point is, kids hardly benefit from these kind of efforts, but it sure feeds a lot of money to computer companies while getting students hooked on their products. Too bad their software is nearly always fundamentally different by the time they reach the work force. Laypeople seem terminally scared of anything programming related, even if it's something simple like LaTeX, yet they have no qualms wasting an entire year learning to use a certain program if it has a polished GUI.
When I was a child, I took three consecutive computer science classes before giving up entirely. In each of them, they taught me how to use the Microsoft Office suite. All three of them, over and over again with no progression. The same thing happened to me the CS class I took in community college. To this day, I still don't remember how to write those stupid Excel macros. I would literally ditch computer science class to read programming manuals in the school library (note that the library itself didn't have any manuals of note, I would read them online on the school computers). If it weren't for the fact that you would be expelled if you were to ditch too many classes, I probably would have done it every day, and I would have been better off doing so.