I saw today that Ramm Emanuel thinks every high schooler in Chicago should learn to code. The folks on Slashdot think it’s a really bad idea.
I’m with Ramm. The point of teaching all young people to code is not to create an army of coders. In fact, I think the world would probably be better off with an Army of Darkness than a bunch of people with one high school class in programming writing software.
But that’s not the point. (Well, maybe it is Ramm’s point.) I would say that most people don’t use trigonometry much, nor do most people write term papers in their daily lives. But those things are worth being exposed to. They teach you how to think abstractly and how to organize ideas for consumption by someone else. Moreover, even if math is hard for you, you hopefully learned that it’s not mysterious or magical. Same goes for writing.
And so it should be with computers. People should feel that they understand them at some basic level, that they know what programming is, and is not. It will help them make better choices in life about computers and software. And those choices come fast and furious these days.