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Comment by ern | Hacker News Reader

Because it's marketed to parents and governments as "skills for the future" or "necessary for a modern workforce". Yet the "real-life" programming world in its current form is both elitist in attitude and genuinely difficult, and a miniscule percentage of kids will actually write code for work (barring a genuine effort to make it easier, and for businesses, developers and consultants to change their attitude to "amateur code").

Literacy is not vocational: it can be applied in many contexts-everyone uses reading all the time. Arithmetic is also plenty useful.

Or that children should be taught to touch-type so that they are eligible to work as transcribers.

Touch-typing isn't widely taught anymore, is it?

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> Touch-typing isn't widely taught anymore, is it?

I dunno? In my elementary school, it was part of the computer lab that we did on a weekly basis. Can't remember if it was part of an English class or a separate computing class, but we played games (e.g. Mavis Beacon type games) and kept score.

> Literacy is not vocational

Why should "Learn to code" be seen as vocation? I understand that's the way it is seen by the majority, but that's not the way it's seen by all advocates of "Learn to code". How did "Everyone learn arithmetic" become ingrained in educational systems?

> Because it's marketed to parents and governments as "skills for the future" or "necessary for a modern workforce".

It is, you can get both of those things because programming teaches you how to really think, and that skill is transferable to anything you do. It's like akin to reading, it's a useful skill to learn no matter your eventual chosen profession. It doesn't have to lead to a programming job.

> Literacy is not vocational: it can be applied in many contexts-everyone uses reading all the time. Arithmetic is also plenty useful.

Programming is the same and belongs in that list with literacy and math.

Pretty much the only reason I can touch type is from smack talking people during Quake sessions

> Touch-typing isn't widely taught anymore, is it?

If true, that is deeply bizarre. Touch-typing, much more so than programming, is actually useful in basically any non-menial job in the modern world. It ought to be as basic to the curriculum as math and reading.

I think they just call it "typing" now. I had to look up what "touch typing" means. There isn't really an alternative; a person has to know qwerty to type, even swiping on a smartphone.

The alternative is hunt-and-peck, aka "look down at the keyboard, find the key you want, and poke it with your index finger." I started programming at age 7 and wasn't taught to touch-type until 11 or so; you definitely don't need formal QWERTY training to input text at a pretty rapid rate. It's still not as fast as touch-typing, though, and being able to type without looking at the keyboard is a huge advantage.

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