
Tech's push to teach coding isn't about kids' success – it's about cutting wages - sceith
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/21/coding-education-teaching-silicon-valley-wages
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aaronbwebber
This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Stop teaching kids anything!
It will just make wages go down! If you teach every kid to read and write, it
will proletarianize the scribes! </sarcasm>

Seriously, though, this is the lump of labor fallacy. There are not a fixed
number of jobs that require programming skills. This is a well-known fallacy,
and people should not be making arguments that have been discredited for >100
years.

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krastanov
This claim sounds like a post-hoc rationalization... Should this not be
applicable to any type of engineering? "The industry pushes for more STEM
education so they have access to cheaper engineering labor force". Yet
engineering of any type is fairly well paid (of course it could be better,
there are way too many things that could and should be better).

And the point of modern education is not simply to create a work force (this
is way too cynical). The fact that it creates a population of well rounded
individuals necessary for a functioning rational democracy seems quite a bit
more important.

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ThrustVectoring
Modern education hasn't produced well-rounded individuals since the nadir of
Taylorism in 1910. It's produced one-dimensional people who are good at
passing arbitrary requirements for the sake of passing arbitrary requirements.
This process is even worse in countries without the socio-cultural background
of the US - read Feynman's description of education in Brazil (iirc, from
Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman) for a fantastic example of this sort of
degeneracy. Essentially, it had students "learning physics" by memorizing and
guessing what the teacher wanted from students who had "learned physics".

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krastanov
I have read it, and I also have worked with educators in the US, France, and
Eastern Europe. While there are plenty of things done wrong, the claim that a
modern school hasn't produced a well-rounded individual is ridiculous. Yes,
there is way too much focus on standardized tests, but there are also many
schools that do a great job at creating stellar pupils. Regrettably, this is
usually available only in affluent areas (and even then it is not universal).

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ThrustVectoring
I'm not sure you can call very many students well-rounded when they haven't
done anything significant on their own initiative at age 21. Adolescents used
to go and learn trigonometry so they could do surveying, or pick up
silversmithing, or whatever, at like age 12 to 16. Now they don't.

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krastanov
Trig to do surveying at 12 is the exact opposite of well rounded. On the other
hand very many students today indeed have amazing breadth of knowledge from
math to literature and civics (which you can see in their writing,
extracurricular choices and volunteer work) - something that gets much rarer
as you go in the past where students had to pick up work at age 12 to 16.
Regrettably, today in the US, schools that are not in affluent areas have
trouble living up to this standard.

