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Comment by phillmv | Hacker News Reader

He's belittling the political stance of code.org as represented by its marketing.

He's not saying "don't teach kids how to program", he's saying "we're teaching kids how to program for the wrong reasons". The implication is, if you're teaching it for the wrong reasons, we're not doing the best we could for the kids.

That's a perfectly valid thing to say, independently of the good intentions and sincere efforts of all the people involved.

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If you know anything about politics or marketing, you know that is far too subtle of a stance to communicate to a broad audience. I think that if you dig in to the work Code.org is doing with educators and policy makers, you'll discover they understand the subtleties of both teaching kids to code for the right reasons, as well as leading a movement.

But is it terribly constructive to do it in such a snarky, belittling way? If they're doing good and you think their methods are wrong, I mean, you can say that without being an ass. Though I guess it doesn't matter.

It's getting us talking about it. I'd say that's pretty effective.

That was my impression also. I was taught programming in school in the 80s and it was part of our mathematics class, to do what Papert intended. Many of us went on to have technical careers in architecture (the design teacher went crazy when CAD was available) and science. I don't recall among my peers at the age that booting up a command line and writing some lines of code was a frightening thing at all, and was 100% designed, as a class, to teach us more ways to express ourselves and consider problem solving. Seeing marketing these days as 'learn to code! make money!' is really sad as it misses the point completely - my peers and I are making good money now because we learnt to think with and put to use the tool that is programming.

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