9th April 2012 11:47
By Blue Tutors
Why is Computer Science teaching going backwards?
In The Guardian Education supplement on Saturday 31st March 2012, John Naughton asks why schools are teaching students how to use Microsoft Word instead of how to code, claiming that in doing so the children are being taught about things past rather than the future. Naughton says, “Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software products...We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children. The crowning apotheosis of this category mistake is a much-vaunted "qualification" called the European Computer Driving Licence.”
Naughton argues that children need teaching about coding so that they can be the future rather than simply a user of the future’s products. Everyone can use a computer now, so why waste valuable curriculum time teaching it? Far more important are those who learn coding, who become the programmers of the future, enabling computer power to affect more and more of our lives in positive ways, discovering solutions to complex problems.
Naughton’s real case is moral though, or so he claims, to ‘free’ children from an impending adulthood of hamsterdom...”The biggest justification for change is not economic but moral. It is that if we don't act now we will be short-changing our children. They live in a world that is shaped by physics, chemistry, biology and history, and so we – rightly – want them to understand these things. But their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don't have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled. They will grow up as passive consumers of closed devices and services, leading lives that are increasingly circumscribed by technologies created by elites working for huge corporations such as Google, Facebook and the like. We will, in effect, be breeding generations of hamsters for the glittering wheels of cages built by Mark Zuckerberg and his kind.”