Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorenn111 | Hacker News Reader

It is clearly not a foreign language, but it might honestly be a better substitute for most students' time. In the US, a foreign language can be a great thing to learn, but with our failing math and science teachings, perhaps shifting towards CS instead might be a good idea for helping many high school kids prepare for a STEM dominated job market.

From the article: "It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief that science and technology education should take precedence over subjects like English, history and foreign languages.

As a professor of languages and literatures, I am naturally skeptical of such a position"

Of course a professor would refer to this as a mistaken belief, but what evidence is there for it? CS has a much better chance of helping one find gainful employment and a future with many paths over high school history, english, and foreign languages.

View on HN

It makes me sad how little we value education beyond gainful employment.

The fine arts are great, after you've put food on the table and a roof over your head. Most people are much happier to have stable employment than esoteric knowledge. The economy and society are better for it too.

School's primary purpose is to prepare people to be functioning members of society.

It's sad that people equate employment to being "functioning members of society." Your job is just one thing you do in society.

Education is about teaching children how to think, communicate, and act as much as giving them specific tools for future careers. Never mind the plethora of studies that have found links between arts education and performance in other educational/vocational areas. It's hardly esoteric.

> Education is about teaching children how to think, communicate, and act

CS is incredible to teach how to think. Algorithms, using logic to solve problems, decomposing a problem, etc... Theses are all skills that make you think, that push you to UNDERSTANDS better. Personally I never seen my college classes as nothing else than learning to learn, because that's computer science. More often than not, the lack of information given by the teacher wasn't a proof of incompetence but a way to test our capacity to search and discover by our self.

Sure I learned a bit in my french classes, sure I learned a bit in my history classes, but I never ever learned to think in any of theses classes except CS. I only learned to apply theses skills.

> Never mind the plethora of studies that have found links between arts education and performance in other educational/vocational areas.

It seems at least possible that this might be due to schools that are better funded tend to offer more arts education, and the better funding would also presumably increase the quality of the education in other areas. Without seeing the studies, it seems hard to conclude that the arts education is the cause of the better performance in other areas.

Correlation or causation?

Define "functioning"?

I can prepare almost anyone to be a functioning member of society so long as you don't want them to be capable of thought or creativity. They won't be a functioning member (or a well-functioning member) of a society ruled by a democratic system of government, though.

At least here in Finland high school (or more precisely, upper secondary school) is regarded to provide students with "general knowledge" and a least exposure to various different fields of study. How are you supposed to know what you want to do in life, if you do not know what possibilities there are?

> School's primary purpose is to prepare people to be functioning members of society.

read: "productive economic units."

It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.

That's a thing that you say that you don't really believe, because there are obvious other goals for mandatory public education; for instance, instilling our civic values.

My post was ambiguous. I think education is “for” gainful employment in that it’s the overriding purpose. Basic socialization is obviously another, and there is some element of instilling civic values. I strongly disagree, however, that compulsory schooling should be a vehicle for teaching kids a variety of things that school boards think is important for “well rounded” people. It becomes too much of a vehicle for shaping kids in the mold of the teachers and academics on the school board.

Also, ever since we started making schools actively hostile to religion, I question how appropriate it is as a vehicle for teaching civic values.

I think it's pretty important to hammer in basic US civil concepts like the meaning of the First Amendment, what roles we're expected to vote for, the separation of church and state, stuff like that. My understanding is that we have an unusually stable constitutional order (relative to other countries) and I assume public education is a big part of that.

Basic numeracy also has value outside of making people more employable, and a reason that there's a nascent movement to replace Algebra 2 with something closer to a basic course on statistics and critical data thinking.

I attended 12 years of Catholic school and while some of my Jesuit high school religion classes were interesting, they were not an especially good use of my time (although they did give me a nuanced understanding of Islam that became valuable for understanding the world later on, which I appreciate). I'd probably have been better off in the public high school my kids went to. And I went to an atypically disciplined and college-focused religious school.

Really? Trade school is what you think of when it comes the reason for public education?

That seems outside the normal experience & expectations of public school in the USA. Here it seems like language, civics, and basic skills are the job.

finally some sense around here, thanks!

Do you think you were taught to value education beyond gainful employment? If so, by whom? If not, where did it come from?

Yes. All my teachers and my family. Life is not slavery.

I think parents and other family members are the ones who most often effectively instill a love of learning in kids, followed by middle and high school teachers, followed by college professors/lecturers.

Information can be transmitted by almost anyone, but a deep love of something can only be instilled through a personal relationship of mutual respect and trust.

art is a hobby

I'm just exploring an idea here but I wonder if the point is that practicing language skills (writing, reading, presenting) are as important as practicing technical skills (computer science, chemistry, math). I might argue that in the business world, we call those language skills soft skills and that they are VERY important in the success of software developers. A great developer who can't communicate or express their ideas thoughtfully struggles more than a less technically inclined developer who communicates more effectively.

One of my favorite interactions to see is when my developers have a thoughtful conversation on a pull request and come up with a creative solution together using a combination of their language and technical skills. Maybe we need people to do both?

Yep, I (easily) spend less than half my time programming. The rest is writing and talking, sometimes to relate facts and sometimes to persuade. I think these skills are more important than just knowing how to write code after a relatively small number of years of experience (maybe 5 to 10). (Unfortunately we don't know how to interview for this and still give people at this level the same coding focused interviews, but that's a whole different discussion...)

Taking this back to academic subjects, I wonder if studying philosophy might be some of the best academic training for this side of programming work.

Unlike many other fields, I would wager that the vast bulk of IT staff were mostly self-taught and many have a lifetime of experience in their field. For those people, school in fact got in the way of their education and career track as it was simply less time they could spend self-educating.

Until college, schools generally do a very poor job at teaching STEM.

But if our schools can't teach math and science, why do you think they're going to be able to teach CS?

It's fashionable to dismiss the humanities today, but we're not talking about Latin here. Speaking Spanish or Mandarin or Hindi is tremendously practical and opens up a wider range of opportunity than learning to code. CS is great, but it's not for everyone, even those who do pursue CS can benefit from being able to communicate with more people.

I passed high school Spanish through the third year at a top-50 California public school. Later when visiting Argentina people found my speech near-incomprehensible, and I could barely get the gist of a typical newspaper story. That was a couple decades later and it's not nothing, but it was nowhere near worth the time it took.

If you're genuinely motivated to learn a language you can do a much better job (and I did, with French as an adult; yes, the Spanish long ago did accelerate that a bit).

You're correct, but the same thing can be said about any grade school subject.

Grade school and a lot of undergraduate work are often about breadth, and you'll never know where your interests lie and how you'll want to apply your knowledge to a career until you have some exposure.

Inevitably, some percentage of people taking math in high school will become engineers, mathematicians, or scientists. Some percentage of people taking English or Social Studies will become project managers, politicians, marketing professionals, etc. Some percentage of foreign language students will do business with a foreign country or otherwise continue their studies. And some percentage of computer science students will become programmers. Some percentage of students taking band, orchestra, choir, or drama club will pursue creative fields. Some percentage of shop and woodworking class students will become tradespeople.

But not every student in every one of those classes will become all of those things.

It doesn't mean that students taking these courses are wasting their time in any way. In an alternate reality you could have fallen in love with Spanish and studied it more rigorously, and you'd have used that knowledge to advance your career. But it didn't really benefit you, and that's okay.

I agree with almost all of that -- but it's not okay to waste people's time with lots of required classes. Compulsory schooling has some benefit, mostly in the basic three R's, outweighed by the costs the further you get from that core. (Among the costs are making a lot of people reflexively hate/disdain subjects they might've liked by coming to them more naturally in their own time. In this case I didn't hate Spanish, it wasn't worse than average for school, but that's saying little.)

It is somewhat practical if there is no opportunity cost, but there is an opportunity cost. Four years of a normal class is nothing. If you devote 4 hours per day for a decade, sure... but that is a lot of time that could be better used for so many other things.

Then, OK, so you learned Mandarin but it turns out you need Hindi. Oops. All that time was wasted because you incorrectly guessed which language (of hundreds) might be useful many years later. Not that it matters of course, because by then you've forgotten the language you learned anyway.

And English is one of the national Languages of India any way

I would argue with the silent conceit that CS/STEM funding must come from humanities funding.

The problem is a lack of funding for useful education. This has led to a hollowing out of useful humanities classes and STEM classes no longer up-to-date with current needs.

Aside, I hope we reinvest in humanities instead of the toothless versions available now. Introducing civics, philosophy, and logic classes back into the curriculum is hugely necessary.

Oh noes an old school media publisher prefers people like them with an English lit degree from an Ivy or Oxbridge.

I am shocked shocked to find C P Snows two nation divide in effect at the NYT

How about wanting to, I don't know, travel to and work in foreign countries one day?

Having a CS education can help pay for that, and help you get work visas. I'm not sure how studying Shakespeare can help though.

Also, learning French won't help you in Germany, but learning JavaScript will help you land a job there if you speak English (a friend of mine who doesn't speak German moved there to do just that).

Having experience in learning a language helps you to learn more languages. In this particular example, understanding that nouns have grammatical gender in French is a helpful bit of linguistics to know that softens the blow when the JavaScript developer decides to learn German.

So you spend a year to save a day. Doesn't sound very wise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com