This is the video that started a conversation a little over a year ago: What Most Schools Don’t Teach. With more than 11.5 million youtube views, it’s sparked both controversy and support, and the debate is still going. Should coding be required in college? High school? Earlier?
Yesterday’s New York Times: “Adding Coding to the Curriculum” reports on programs in Estonia, England and Singapore that are teaching coding in schools as early as age five. According to a December 2013 Forbes article, England will be the world’s first country to make computer programming compulsory in all schools.
The U.S. lags behind, with only 10 percent of all schools teaching some form of coding. Chicago Public Schools announced in December they would make computer science classes part of the core curriculum. Most suburban and private schools offer some computer science at the high school level, usually AP Computer Science (but only 1.4% of all high school students took the AP exam). Most are not required core subjects. Should they be?
Code.org, a non-profit that seeks to expand programming curriculum in schools, produced the What Most Schools Don’t Teach short as a way to make coding look like a sexy career choice. And although the numbers for computer science majors have jumped almost 30 percent in the past four years, the U.S. is still producing far too few CS majors to keep pace with the job market.
But the real question is whether requiring everyone to learn some coding—even the future art history major—is of benefit in a society where everyone is so reliant on technology most of us don’t understand. At Stanford, where 90 percent of students take at least one coding class—not required—the very subject, and the video, created its own mini-firestorm. The Stanford Daily quoted a classics professor as saying “The humanities are so much more necessary than coding.”
But are they? Computer science champions insist that learning coding improves problem-solving and logical thinking skills, and that one does not have to be a coding whiz on the level of Mark Zuckerberg to have mastered even the basic skill sets of programming.
The argument for both sides was illustrated in an online dust-up over the necessity of learning programming for a non-CS career. The job field: journalism.
In a piece entitled “Should Journalism Schools Require Reporters to ‘Learn Code’? No” Atlantic reporter Olga Khazan wrote: “If you want to be a reporter, learning code will not help. It will only waste time that you should have been using to write freelance articles or do internships—the real factors that lead to these increasingly scarce positions.”
This logic could be applied to pretty much any career, from art historian to gaffer. And it reminded me of a fruitless last-ditch effort in the spring of my senior year in college to get out of the third required science course I needed to graduate. I met with a Dean to argue how completely useless the astronomy course I was being forced into was going to be in my chosen career field, an argument I could see in about two seconds I was going to lose.
A journalism professor at USC named Robert Hernandez (who taught Ms. Khazan) sums up the long-ago rebuttal the Dean meted out to me (between chortles) with a response piece to the Atlantic article titled: “Those Required Courses in Journalism School Are There For a Reason.”
His point: “You may have forgotten this, but once upon a time, you probably hated that you were required to take some of those general education courses — math, science, a language. But those same courses — or maybe it was philosophy, or psychology — changed the way you thought and viewed life.” In other words, suck it, Olga, the coding class is there to drag you kicking and screaming into the 21st century world of newsgathering. At least one other young writer agrees with Hernandez.
Most high schools and colleges may not require coding now, but the HTML is on the wall—it’s only a matter of time. Getting ahead of the curve can only help.
For today’s high school students, taking advantage of your school’s computer science classes should be a no-brainer.