Teaching children coding is a waste of time, the OECD’s education chief has said, as he predicts the skill will soon be obsolete. Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said that the skill is merely “a technique of our times” and will become irrelevant in the future. "Five hundred years ago we might have thought about pen literacy,” Mr Schleicher said. "In a way coding is just one technique of our times. And I think it would be a bad mistake to have that tool become ingrained. "You teach it to three-year-olds and by the time they graduate they will ask you 'Remind me what was coding'. That tool will be outdated very soon." Comparing it to trigonometry, he said: "We are going to get into the same dilemma. I think is very important that we strike a better balance about those kinds of things. "For example, I would be much more inclined to teach data science or computational thinking than to teach a very specific technique of today." The Government has championed the teaching of coding and computing skills, with the Chancellor allocating £84 million to treble the number of computing science teachers in 2017’s Autumn Budget. A new National Centre for Computing was set up to train up the 8,000 new teachers in the subject. Computing became part of the national curriculum in 2014, and the GCSE in Information and Computer Technology (ICT) was axed in favour of a new qualification in computing which includes more coding and programming.
Let me provide a simple example which counters a recent press release with one of my own:
The new Purpleperson College of Typing has selected is new
Dean, Prof Swifty Fingers, a world renowned expert in the new field of typing
and more importantly shorthand. Prof. Fingers is a known leader in STEM, the
"Shorthand, Typing, Erasing, and Margins" field, for which there is
an explosion of new opportunities. Prof Fingers also is an advocate of the new
field of shorthand, also known as Automated Inscription, or "AI", an
exciting new technology that allows for the capture of human utterances and
placing them in a coded manner on small pieces of paper, which in turn may be
readily transcribed using the new typewriter technology currently infusing
every academic discipline.
This new technology accompanied by AI has become an indispensable
element of every field of knowledge from classic Greek to Botany, to the study
of Law. As such the new Purpleperson College of Typing will have all of these
Departments subsumed under it new Dean and a major thrust will be the training
of STEM to a multicultural groups as an
essential part of the country's global competitiveness.
As Prof. Fingers had noted in the inaugural address"
"There has been no other technology that has spanned
all areas of knowledge in such a short period of time as the typewriter and no
adjunct to that technology such as AI which will create a competitive edge to
every field."
Prof. Fingers then demonstrated his own ability to copy from
a record produced by Mr. Edison a speech of President Grant at some 90 words
per minute and then he had one of his post doc students use the newest
Remington typewriter to type it in the same 90 words per minute. The audience
was aghast as such a technological breakthrough.
The White House issued its own typed press release saying
that the US would remain at the forefront of this new revolution.
Yes the above is fiction, but not that much of fiction. You see, a hundred plus years ago young men were trained on these devices. Then as they needed more and more they created secretaries, and we all know where that ended. Any reasonable person now does their own typing most likely on some highly sophisticated electronic device.
Thus the who coding thing is a waste of time. I spent years on Latin, and I actually still use it. I spent time on Greek, it helped when I was in Athens, still took a year to catch up. I use trigonometry, I use algebra, calculus, and use data manipulation and calculation skills.
Teaching skills such as BASIC is now defunct, Python, may have use for specific purposes. Who knows COBOL, FORTRAN, and the list goes on. Critical thinking and organizational skills are useful. C++++++ may not be, for all.
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