Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

The metaphor of software being like literature is flawed. It is more apt to deem it an edifice. Buildings, much like software, are absolutely ubiquitous. Chances are on average you don't intimately understand the workings of contemporary civil engineering.

And, while you should absolutely be able to modify your house, the reality is a lot of other buildings are off-limits to you or purpose-built for a specific recipient or cause. Indeed, a huge amount of software is designed to be sold to specific contractors and not to the public at large. Nor will the public realistically have the chance to modify most of the software they interact with, either because they're just circuits, dumb terminals or another reason.

Thirdly, software is permanent, modulo bit rot. That is to say most people can be satisfied entirely by existing written solutions. Simple task automation, scripts and macros can be self-taught if the person sees an opportunity. Actually creating legitimately new things requires a deep proficiency in a problem domain that a pedestrian knowledge of programming will not satisfy.

Also, if you're going to promote ideals for governments, I strongly suggest you promote free software, not open source.

Couldn't this same rationale be applied to high-school level math? It's one of the biggest excuses made about learning anything beyond arithmetic -- unless I'm pursuing engineering or some computation-heavy career, when will I need to care about calculus? Or for that matter, why ever learn about cell biology in elementary school? Not everyone is going to be a geneticist, and most pharma patents are completely off limits, so why bother?

Yet it's important that we learn all these pieces because we expect a fundamental level of understanding about the world we live in, including how that world and what we know about it is changing. Without an informed electorate and a labor force primed with the skillset necessary for the current job market, not one that's passed, we suffer collectively. Thirty years ago, it wouldn't have made sense to make something like computer literacy or computer science a compulsory subject, but considering just how much it touches every aspect of the world and our lives today, it seems remiss to not empower students with the knowledge and skills to interact with and change that world for themselves.

unless I'm pursuing engineering or some computation-heavy career, when will I need to care about calculus? Or for that matter, why ever learn about cell biology in elementary school? Not everyone is going to be a geneticist, and most pharma patents are completely off limits, so why bother?

Agreed. Why bother? In fact, forcing children to learn these topics often harms them so irreparably that they not only don't retain the knowledge, but can't bring themselves to be interested later in life.

Make it optional. Make the topics available for children who want to know. Make it self-selected, just like every other aspect in life.

The point of compulsory education is to provide a common memetic foundation for society's interaction and communication.

Without that shared foundation, we see endlessly polarized political talking heads debating nonissues for attention instead of reasoned debate and informed participation in society.

I'm not sure if the elites of HN have spent much time among today's average youth, but they certainly aren't learning a common memetic foundation. They barely graduate from high school. And in fact, the average youth are what drag down today's achievers. The achievers are made to feel there's something wrong with them, and that it's a sin against the collective to try to be better than average.

Yet averages are precisely the problem. You throw your achievers together with the average, giving them nowhere to go and no outlets to explore. Programming is one of the few outlets, as it isn't compulsory, yet here we're talking about ripping that one away too.

I figured out what the original comment reminded me of:

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

"We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world."

I'm not sure if the elites of HN have spent much time among today's average youth, but they certainly aren't learning a common memetic foundation. They barely graduate from high school. And in fact, the average youth are what drag down today's achievers. The achievers are made to feel there's something wrong with them, and that it's a sin against the collective to try to be better than average.

FWIW, I graduated high-school in 1991, which is probably before some posters here were born. And everything you just said was true in 1991 as well. I have a hunch it was true quite some time before that as well.

I think you're wrong, if only because compulsory education exists and politics is dominated by polarized political talking heads. I think your explanation is very optimistic. My explanation might sound cynical, but compulsory education in some part is clearly intended to mold children into parts that fit well into the economic machine, and another part is inculcating them into the civil religion of the nation.

The point of compulsory education is to provide a common memetic foundation for society's interaction and communication.

That's the charitable view. Another view is that the point of compulsory education is to create generation after generation of children who have had any sense of independence, creativity, initiative or inclination towards free thinking, beaten out of them - generations of children who don't question authority and make good, unquestioning worker drones.

I'm not saying one view is right or the other is wrong, but let's not be too quick to accept the presumed virtues of compulsory education without looking at the dark side.

Without that shared foundation, we see endlessly polarized political talking heads debating nonissues for attention instead of reasoned debate and informed participation in society.

Sadly, we appear to have those things already, even though we have (in the US) a fairly extensive public education system, and compulsory education through age 16 / 17 or so (I suppose that varies by state?) and - nominally - higher literacy rates than in decades past. Although on that last point, I think there's a bit of an open question. Measuring literacy is apparently something that wasn't a priority, say, 200 years ago, and detailed, verifiable statistics are hard to come by. But I've seen some commentary to the effect that the US had better literacy rates in centuries past, than we have now.

I'd actually like to know more about that, but it's a pretty politically charged issue and it isn't necessarily easy to find good info.

A lot of high school math is pretty pointless for most people, though. It doesn't even help people understand the world, because they don't understand the math, they just do it by rote. I think we'd be a lot better off if we taught high schoolers some basic statistics and finance rather than fourteen different ways to solve a quadratic equation.

> It doesn't even help people understand the world, because they don't understand the math, they just do it by rote.

And thereby, ironically, they are, in a way, getting a certain type of computing education in computing! For instance, doing pencil and paper arithmetic by rote is nothing more than executing algorithms. The algorithms work on an input representation, and contain various cases to be considered, terminating conditions, and outputs produced in the appropriate areas of the paper.

Because people should be exposed to a variety of disciplines, and they should be given the chance to demonstrate a talent for whichever they find suits them. In that sense, we should absolutely expose kids to programming.

But it isn't the same as reading. Reading is a primary form of communication and it's fundamentally critical to joining society.

You're naive if you believe that the same public schools which barely get Algebra I right will turn around to start properly teaching discrete mathematics.

Except they won't even do that, because the proposed "computer science" courses will be little more than rote exercises in learning an ALGOL-like notation. It most certainly will not impart any fundamental level of understanding, but quite to the contrary a very specific and wrong one. Learning a notation without knowing what problems to solve is useless, and will not leave anyone informed.

We're already struggling with the fact that even a lot of professional programmers don't really have the fundamentals down, but are stuck accepting various abstractions as absolutes. Making "computer science" (code monkeying) a compulsory school subject will worsen this.

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