Flip through any newspaper or scroll through headlines on your phone. Interspersed between the latest ISIS outrage and Kardashian news, are politicians, parents, captains of industry waxing poetic about the importance of teaching young people to “code”.
They look all around them and see app-making as the new Gold Rush. They see that even Kim Kardashian has a moneymaking app. Parents worry about the flagging economy, and want to make sure their kids are adequately prepared for the future job market. Politicians hear influential businessmen bemoaning the lack of skilled tech workers to fill their employee ranks. They want to steer more people towards “coding” as a bulwark against future mass unemployment. It also helps them sound forward-thinking, which helps during elections.
Let a million coding learning centers boom, they decreed. A lot of high schools are now scrambling to offer “coding” classes for their students. Some institutions are even offering it earlier at the elementary school level.
Push more people towards computer science courses. Stack vocational schools with coding classes and encourage unemployed 22 year old college grads, single parents, senior citizens, former secretary and recently laid off 30 something Ana, 45 year old Bob who ran the corner store for a decade before it went bankrupt when a chain supermarket moved in, your mom, your former babysitter, your 9 year old nephew everybody, basically, to sign up and learn coding, the magical skill of the future that will make you rich, cure your dandruff, and increase our GDP to Kingdom Come!
“Coding”, a nebulous phrase that encompasses software programming, scripting, website markup language, mobile app development, hardware programming, etc., is touted as essential for modern literacy.
Aside from people who worked professionally in software development and enthusiasts who spent time building software, contributing to open source projects, making websites, “ordinary” people used to also be engaged in “coding”.
They may be employees who were trained on the job to cobble programs in Visual Basic for internal usage inside a company, or quirky collectors putting together a website to showcase their 1,000 snowglobes, or artists who don’t care about programming but learned Actionscript anyway to create films in Flash (R.I.P. Flash). In other words, a means for non-technical people to achieve another end: some kind of project, whether personal or corporate.
But today, it has gone from all that to a “SHOULD”, a “MUST”. All sorts of vague notions about wealth creation through app creation and delusions of producing people learned in magical programming knowledge being the solution to economic and labor woes have led to a Greek chorus clamoring for codifying “coding” as a cornerstone of modern education.
Such is the state of our shortsighted modern culture — we aim for superficial solutions, we panic, we hop to trendy “must have skills/ degrees” because it is supposedly the way to riches, or at the very least, a more secure future.
This piece is not a Luddite’s lament that kids are learning Linux instead of Latin. I love technology. I have seen how it brings hope and opportunities to people whose economic class or social station in life would prevent them from experiencing those otherwise.
But to what ends are we pushing “coding” onto people without looking at the wider context of their lives? When traditional structured education providers coopt coding, what usually happens is it becomes yet another silo’d off subject that’s taught through rote and with the goal of getting a grade or passing a requirement.
A lot of fortunate people can go on to high quality coding bootcamps that cater to adult job switchers, or attend universities with strong computer science, programming or research departments, or competitive high schools where technology learning is integrated into the whole context of the student’s academic pursuits.
But these are expensive. And the ones who are now being pushed on to save themselves and their future by learning “coding” are less affluent people who are being pushed toward this precisely because they were not served well by lower quality schools, or had to take on dead end jobs due to economic distress.
What usually happens when “musts” and “shoulds” are imposed from the top is a hurried morass of poor quality training that people optimistically grab on to as a lifeline.
Without knowing why, desperate people memorize syntaxes and commands by rote, sticking to the languages du jour, not understanding how this integrates into a bigger picture other than the silo of that particular class.
I dread the day when coding turns into another “useless” subject or hoop people must jump through as a requirement to get a piece of printed paper, without which, they cannot enter artificially erected barriers of entry.
That kind of bureaucratic imposed training will produce people who know one or two languages, but by the time they try to enter the workforce, the landscape has changed! Now, there will be even more credentialed unemployed people jockeying for limited spots. After spending time and money earning those credentials.
They may not even be able to use their coding skills to make their own products because they were taught in such an assembly line way the way all their other subjects were taught — English, Math, History. It will be just another rote learned subject they won’t know how to use. It has no bearing in the bigger scheme of their lives.
Technical literacy for all is a noble goal. But it should not repeat the mistakes of mass education of the past- where subjects are walled off into their own separate fiefdoms and the most important goal is a grade, or completing a requirement to get a diploma, or finishing a school imposed project.
To prevent a crisis of producing more depressed automatons with outdated domain dependent skills, we must de-emphasize learning to code for the sake of learning “coding”, a supposed magical pathway to guaranteed employment or entrepreneurial success.
I believe that learning should be an enjoyable, life long experience. Not something one grins and bears from age 7 to 21 as something to endure before real life. And then dreads when one has to pick up something new to change careers.
We should look deep into why we are studying what we are studying, and how we intend to use it. We should learn how to discern what we want to do and how to get there. Because devoid of context, a lot of what we learned because “it was required” will not even be able to help us get ahead- whether we dream of creating our own startup or joining a great company.
What’s great is there are now many people rethinking education. Nanodegrees, project based learning, high schools without grades and exams, etc.
One organization that’s reworking education is Exosphere. It offers workshops and bootcamps of varying lengths that focus on entrepreneurship, problem solving, and futuristic technology . Exosphere believes that people of all ages and backgrounds can learn from each other. That’s why it draws participants from different places, walks of life, and ages.
Exosphere does believe in making oneself literate in modern technological tools, so coding IS a part of its bootcamps too. But the goal of learning this is not just to “learn how to code”, but to be able to use it to solve problems or integrate it into your bigger life goals, or if nothing else, to find out that it’s not something you want to pursue.
That’s why there’s also a strong introspective and philosophical aspect to Exosphere’s bootcamps where participants are invited to discuss concepts such as antifragility, self reliance, etc.
Different activities also push participants to learn more about themselves and discern their goals. Then they come to see how the different tools and skillsets they have can help them achieve those goals.
For coding is just a tool among many. And without knowing your ultimate purpose(s) and how your skills and knowledge (be it coding or something else) fits into it, you will still be floundering lost, even if you aced a Javascript course.
All photos © Gem.
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