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Comment by professorTuring | Hacker News Reader

Teaching those topics at school is crazy. This is just "random stuff" for kids, completely nonsense.

We should teach "how" computers work (very basic principles) and maybe "how" communications work (very basic principles). And definitely we don't need to teach kids about HTTP... Maybe, and only maybe, we could teach them how a programming language can help them with their "math homeworks" and things like that...

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Yes good point - teaching the basic principles is sort of what I was thinking - HTTP bad example.

Actually, I think teaching about HTTP isn't a bad example. At it's base it is pretty simple to understand, there are good tools to work with it, it's hugely important and it leads on nicely to things like DNS and security.

There are thousands of applications that abstract normal people from the "HTTP". Knowing stuff is a great thing, but forcing people to learn stuff is something totally different.

Show kids how to build a webpage with HTTP and CSS and they will run for their lives. Maybe you can teach them how to configure any content manager making an effort in explain them how having a webpage can affect their lives and how can they prevent them (security, privacy...).

It is school guys, teach kids useful tools for their lives, don't bore them with hypes (I am purposely obviating the "brain" development thing).

Teaching kids the specifics of some content management system seems as daft to me as focusing on MS Office.

So right, but you have to use "something" as example, I don't mind which one you prefer as long as it comes with a "how this affect my life" explanation.

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