
Stop "Teaching Kids to Code" - lemcoe9
http://blog.lemcoe.com/stop-teaching-kids-to-code.html
======
kd0amg
_I definitely do not think this is in the best interest of young people. It
prepares students not for a fruitful career, rather it forces a trade that is
not necessarily suited to the majority of students._

Or perhaps it just teaches them a broadly-applicable skill that does not have
to be taken up as a full-time job in order to be useful.

~~~
timr
Like carpentry, plumbing or auto repair?

Yeah, who am I kidding? Nobody needs those things. That's why we teach them in
"vocational technology" schools. Totally different than writing code.

------
dzink
Dear D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr.,

When I started high school I rebelled against by brick-and-mortar entrepreneur
parents by going into tech and teaching myself how to code. I was volunteering
at internet cafes, because my family considered computers expensive toys and I
was making an average worker's monthly salary in a couple of days by coding
after hours. Even my highly respected grandparents suggested I should go into
a "reputable career instead".

That was 15 years ago. Since then my work has been used by millions of people
and I have been able to amplify the impact of my time far beyond what I could
have ever done with two hands and a brain in the same amount of time in a
reputable profession.

"Coding" is no more a forced skill than learning how to write. It is a form of
literacy. If you have it, you have choices and access to reach and change the
world if you need to. Without it, you are limited to your location, means, and
circumstances in what you can do with your time.

If you ever need a slap-in-your face moment 10 years from now, feel free to
re-read your blog post.

~~~
lemcoe9
You are exactly the exception I discussed - the world-class developer.

Did you even read the post?

------
jdlshore
I read the entire essay. As I read it, I found myself wondering who D.
Marshall Lemcoe Jr. was, and what experience he had in the industry. After I
clicked through to his app.net profile, I found this biography, which I'm
sharing in case you had the same question:

"18-year-old business owner, web developer, systems administrator, high school
basketball official, diction junkie, computer enthusiast, car enthusiast,
college student."

~~~
kolinko
ad hominem

~~~
kylemaxwell
No - the grandparent did not engage in any attack. It provided context.

~~~
kolinko
How is that context relevant? Wasn't the intention behind the context to
discredit the author?

~~~
vampirechicken
The context, without further comment, allows the reader to be informed of the
perspectives and possible biases of the author. I ask "How that is not
relevant?"

------
300bps
Teaching kids to code isn't about turning them into future code monkeys. It's
about exposing them to skills that will very likely be essential in the
future.

I work at an investment bank. Believe it or not, there are executives there
that have no idea how to use email. Their secretary prints every email out,
reads them to them in their office and the executive then verbally dictates a
response that will be typed out by the secretary. These executives honestly
don't even know how to use the phones. They can get away with this because
they're in their 60s and have four decades of experience.

Now imagine a 20 year old getting hired today and on his first day he
discloses that he doesn't know how to use email and doesn't know how to use a
phone. And worse - he has no interest in learning either. How long until he
would be escorted out the door?

In the future, there will be fewer IT departments. Using commodities like CPU,
disk and RAM will be as familiar to the common workforce as using electricity
is today. There will be 60 year olds that don't know how to extract data from
a database and group it, sort it and transfer it from one application to
another. But you better not be a 20 year old in that situation.

Teach your kids to code. Not to be a code monkey - but so they can do whatever
it is they choose to do in the future.

------
kylemaxwell
Yes, what we need for a better future society are more lawyers and
accountants. Because that's what wrong with today: too many people making cool
shit and not enough people counting beans or drawing up contracts.

------
samstave
I have an idea;

instead of teaching "kids to code" \-- how about putting together a list of
[N] things every [kid/child] should know how to accomplish by [end of
grammar/middle/highschool/college] using development languages [x, y, z]

\---

By end of grammar school a child should be able to confidently navigate the
internet, and have a basic understanding of how websites work.

By end of middle school, be able to create simple web pages. * Create a blog
about themselves * Create a site about an interest or passion * Create a forum
where their friends can talk

By end of highschool, be able to create simple applications. * Create a time-
managment app * Create a budgeting app * Create a goals tracking app

Etc....

Make sure that all kids have a common shared lexicon in this area and
experience taking a stab at developing apps and sites that have the same
requirements. Allow them to expound upon execution through social interaction
about these items.

~~~
kolinko
It's not about creating stuff, it's about understanding how stuff works.

I can teach a monkey to set up a Wordpress page or write a "Hello World", but
the skill will be useless if the monkey doesn't understand what's going on and
cannot translate this skill into a different environment.

It's easy to see how badly a checklist you mentioned would work. You could
teach kids those tasks using a certain kind of tools (web pages - iLife,
simple apps - scaffolds in RoR; and so on), and this knowledge would be
useless because the tools would change before kids would finish their
education. But teach students to _understand_ things, and this will stick.
Teach people to understand how the computer works, understand how the
programming languages work and so on, and they will manage to figure all the
other things themselves.

If there is one skill that student should be taught though, it's "how to
google things up". It's surprising, but kids don't know how to use internet to
find knowledge. Everyone assumes that since they spend so much time on the
internet, they should be fluent at searching. They are not.

~~~
samstave
The problem is that you're going to have a tough time teaching an 8 year old
the theory behind how things work. Just show them how to do something simple
with concrete results.

Each child will take this to the degree they can - some will find no interest,
some will be wildly beyond the simple demo.

The point is to make sure that there are concrete results from each step, my
post was just a first pass at an example, not some absolute...

The point is that it would be beneficial to have a tiered path toward
advancement that can be followed.

~~~
kolinko
Well, I guess what I meant was that the path should be measured by
understanding of the subject, not by high-level skills. Or, at least if the
skills were to be measured, they should be low-level, like - the ability to
search information on the web, the ability to ask a question on a relevant
forum, an ability to manage the filesystem, and so on.

As for the 8-year old understanding the theory behind how things work... I
learned how body/animals operate on the biology class at the age of 10; and
the basics of physics as well.

------
duncan_bayne
I can imagine an article just like this, several hundred years ago, with the
title Stop Teaching "Kids To Write".

Programming is fast becoming the new literacy.

~~~
timr
Speaking as someone who has taught a lot of students, let me assure you:
_literacy_ is the new literacy.

Most kids entering college (in the US at least) are abysmally bad at reading
and writing. Programming skills won't help you if you can't read or
communicate in writing.

~~~
kolinko
When you teach programming, you teach reading, writing and logic as well.

~~~
kylemaxwell
If that were the case, then programmers would have fantastic documentation
skills. And yet, by and large that's not the case.

~~~
kolinko
Good documentation takes effort. I bet much of the docs are lousy because of
laziness or poor priorities.

Apart from that, the question is not whether the documentation is good or bad,
but whether it's better or worse than the one a non-programmer would write.

Finally, even apart from writing skills, programming teaches you how to
comprehend what you're reading (docs), and how to solve problems.

------
kevando
This is a good example of "as wrong in the opposite direction." American
families and secondary education should place more value on providing
resources and encouraging computer science. For sure. But saying "teach kids
to code" misses the mark just as much as "dont teach kids to code." It's a
buzz phrase. And I love a good pivot into creating an MVP growth hack for lean
movement, but the education of our students is too important. Lets have a more
serious conversation

------
gremlinsinc
This article pissed me off, coding is a skill that teaches math, logic,
comprehension, --all extremely important skills, it also teaches about
consequences of actions via if/then statements we learn if we do something, it
has a result. Kids need to learn this. It also teaches problem solving another
crucially important skill - and I read STORY after STORY about a doctor, or
lawyer who taught themselves to code to build an app...

Why would a rich doctor or lawyer need to code if it wasn't important? Why
waste the time or money to learn? There will be hundreds of areas in a
person's life where they could potentially find a way to make something easier
through coding, and coding can also be translated into REAL world stuff via
arduino, raspberry pi, etc -- the fact is w/ the internet of things, wearable
tech, and robots taking over the workforce -- coding is something that we all
should know at least a little bit about, and NO student will be worse off for
having learned it.

If this is your logic, then why should we teach Music, Sports, or Art? (All
important parts of our lives... but not something crucial to get along in life
w/ unless your profession is in one of these fields, but if we didn't teach
it, less people would go into it. )

------
dllthomas
_" I definitely agree that students should have a good foundation for how to
use technology as a tool in their lives, but going as far to say that students
should be able to program the tools they use is a stretch. Do we emphasize
writing skills to the extent that every student should become the next best-
seller?"_

Should we expect every student to be able to build a full-fledged (say)
statistical modeling package? No, of course not. Should we expect students to
know their way around "programming" well enough to express what they want to
do in the domain they choose to work in without clicking through menus?
_Absolutely_. To compare the latter to "writing a best-selling novel" would be
inane. We should teach kids to write well enough that they can write a
moderate length letter, and we should teach kids to program well enough that
they can write a moderate length script.

The notion that the kind of programming instruction we give to anyone pre-
college (outside of _exceedingly_ rare circumstances) is more like the former
than the latter is, I think, entirely off base - generally, we don't even give
the latter.

------
ufmace
I've been feeling somewhat more doubtful lately on the whole idea of
compulsory education based on lists, tests, and lectures. Sorta in the same
vein as that, I don't really see the point in "teaching kids to code". I fully
support giving them all of the tools that they need to learn how to code, or
to learn and do things in any other field they might be interested in. In the
internet age, most of this is already online for free.

I am much more doubtful that there is any value in making kids sit in a
programming class and write whatever programs the instructor tells them to in
whatever language the class uses. I've had to sit through a few classes like
that, and I don't think any of them have really taught me anything besides how
to game the class grading system. I learned everything I know by going out and
doing stuff on my own.

------
mappu
I went into this article assuming it would take the position that we should
instead be teaching _people_ to code rather than children specifically. There
are plenty of adults who have had their jobs displaced by software that could
do with a hand.

But it's a thinly disguised rant about the author's personal preferences in
life direction. It seems like the author thinks there's no middle ground
between creating a startup and being a "code monkey". What's wrong with
"taking a corporate job"?

I agree that programming as a profession isn't for everyone, but the article
almost contradicts itself - if the author hadn't learned to program, the
apparel company wouldn't be able to rely on his software. A perfect example of
how software literacy can be used outside an explicit programming position.

------
tuananh
I dislike the whole idea of teaching code to kids, only if they show
interested in logic stuff and stuff alike.

Maybe they're talented at other stuff you know, like literacy, painting,
etc... Why would they need to learn how to code?

However, making programming a general subject is good though. Show them their
career choice early.

------
krrishd
I woudn't go as far as to say that it isn't going to help kids if they learn
to code, but I agree the term 'hacking' has been beaten to a pulp; when people
talk about 'hacking', they aren't talking about bypassing some server's
security to access secure data, they're usually like "OMG I just learned HTML
I'm a hacker now". I talked a bit about this here -
[http://krrishd.github.io/blog/post/to-code-or-not-to-
code](http://krrishd.github.io/blog/post/to-code-or-not-to-code)

------
disputin
I don't see a problem with kids having a computing class, just as they have
history, biology, physical ed, etc classes. I do have an issue with the
glamorisation, rockstar bandwagon that people outside the industry have jumped
on. Presumably policy makers talk to the silicon valley people, who pass on
their rose tinted view. If policy makers spoke to the rest, the blue collar
crud shovellers, I expect they'd be less caught up in the gold rush.

------
bkeating
Coming from a teenager, this article makes sense and I enjoyed the point of
view, but this is horrible advice, D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr. You should consider
letting this one hit the floor.

