Lessons Learned: Please teach kids programming, Mr. President

The cell phone point is particularly out of place. How many kids are taking class notes on their cell phones?

I'll take your suggestion a bit further--I think, instead of looking to the government to implement these changes, why not provide an opportunity for bright kids to opt out of the current system? Enable cooperatives and networks to provide the kids with environments that will them flourish.

I largely agree, but I've always had this little bit of me that says "Most people do not need to know most sciences".

I mean, we don't teach circuit design to everybody, on the sensible principle that most people will never design a circuit. But we teach the anatomy of worms to everybody because... most people will eventually have a pressing need to dissect a worm? I mean, I'm not the world's most accomplished programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I very rarely get asked by the bosses "Hey, Patrick, after you get done with that Javascript, could you please pull the heart out of the worm on my desk?"

I was also forced as a child to learn about some rocks floating around in the general vicinity of the sun. I still don't know why these rocks matter -- my best guess is that pre-modern civilizations thought they were gods, poets picked up on it, and people now consider the notion of travel to them sort of romantic. I'm at a loss as to how learning about rocks prepares one for programming, unless one aims to be one of the few hundred programmers engaged in writing software to control missions to space aimed at getting ever-more-detailed photos of the rocks "for scientific purposes".

Ditto lab chemistry. Titration is a) technician work -- its a repetitive process with about as much intellectual content as swapping hard drives which b) will be performed by perhaps half of a percent of the population in their lives, if that. Yet we make everyone do it. It makes about as much sense as making woodcarving mandatory for everyone... because you never know, right?

Teach them programming in addition to that. Ideally, the students should have a minimal exposure to everything under the sun -- or at least, as much of it as is practical. An in-depth knowledge of specific fields shouldn't be required, but basic exposure is wonderful for showing people what they're interested in, as well as giving them an appreciation for what people do.

>Don't teach kids programming; teach them science, math, languages, geography, music etc.

Don't teach kids, inspire them to learn instead...

Learning to build or repair a car would probably improve your understanding of thermodynamics, aerodynamics, momentum, etc. Likewise, writing a computer program that simulates the motion of a planet around a star or renders 3D graphics might improve your understanding of classical mechanics and any number of topics in math, just to name a few examples; cf.

http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful...

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Classical-Mec...

http://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificial...

This is not to mention that learning how to program a computer is just another tool to put in your bags of tricks for solving problems in any of the domains you mentioned (some better suited than others, of course).