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Comment by paul9290 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed it's really sad that here in the U.S. our school system's do not offer coding classes as electives. Though we still put a strong emphasis in offering foreign languages like French and Russian?

Having base coding knowledge and experience will go a longer way for our children then teaching them a foreign language like French, Russian and other languages!

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> Having base coding knowledge and experience will go a longer way for our children then teaching them a foreign language like French, Russian and other languages!

People who make false dichotomies like these threaten to undermine the entire push to make programming and computer science available in lower education.

Our children should be able to learn a foreign language; our children should be able to learn to code. One is not better than another; what's important is that children have the possibility to learn both.

I agree with you! Working with children I realized how amazingly fast they are able to pick up anything you teach them. I wish I had someone to teach me coding at age of 8 or something. Its just amazing seeing kids do stuff in a weeks I myself could only do after months or years of learning programming

Indeed providing the option to learn a foreign language to our children is valuable.

Though for me what did five years of French class do for me? I would have preferred spending that time learning a skill that would help me later in life.

I wouldn't underestimate the importance of languages. Yes coding is important, that's the point of this thread, but natural languages as much as programming ones are integral to a good education, especially here on the other side of the pond.

Indeed it's really sad that here in the U.S. our school system's do not offer coding classes as electives.

They don't? I took Logo and BASIC programming on the Apple IIe in 7th and 8th grade (1988, 1989). BASIC on the PC in 9th. Switched to Pascal and covered all the basic data structures and algorithms in 10th - 12th grade. That was a looong time ago. Surely computer education in schools has only improved since then in most places, right?

I took basic in 4th grade (89). We were introduced to Logo in 7th grade math. I hit a limit in the amount of extra credit I could get from Logo drawings :)

I grew up in a tiny town of 3000 in the middle of Kansas.

That maybe the case in some select schools and those schools are now offering html,css,photoshop,javascript, python, ruby, iOS, java, php and others. Though those schools are not your average schools.

In general the school system is still more focused on offering foreign language classes to students then teaching them coding languages. The latter skill being more valuable then the former!

But the former being far more valuable for understanding one's own language, and preparing a young person for college-level reading and writing.

That said, based on my own experiences, I think that a fast-track program could be developed to create functional, real-world (e.g. CRUD apps) developers straight out of high school. Basically, technical school for the modern world.

I had similar exposure in school, but from what I've seen with the young people in my family, it's gone the other way. There are no computer classes. They don't even teach typing anymore.

That's interesting, and appalling. I'll have to look into this more.

For the record, I went to a completely average high school in the Pacific Northwest. It was neither a rich nor poor district. There was no meaningful computer industry in the area. I have to admit that we did get a relatively awesome CS teacher when I was a sophomore, and without the freedom he granted us, I likely would not have gotten half as far as I did.

I went to grade school in Redmond, WA. Interestingly, there was seemingly no Microsoft presence at all - it was all Commodore PETs and Apple IIs.

I wonder if the attitude in some schools is "everyone has a computer at home and knows how to use one now", so they shrug their shoulders and feel like there's nothing left to contribute. The kids print out or email their homework from their computers, so maybe they think that's all buttoned up.

I wonder if the interest in programming is even there anymore. When I was a kid, it was amazing to draw lines and colors on the screen (and sometimes, colors weren't even an option!). These days, I wonder if kids still delight at making the computer render simple drawings and programs, or if XBoxes and Facebook have rendered such trivial programs uninteresting.

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