naïvely, I would have hoped we would already be teaching this as a basic subject, along with the three R's Reading Writing Arithmetic

but no, we have PC's EVERYWHERE today, they are a part of everything we do and touch, and it still isn't a core subject

shame on us really :o(

It's easy to say you think so and so should be covered but there are only so many hours available. What do you propose is taken off the syllabus to make space for it? That's a harder question.

Personally I think it's the "everyone should do everything" attitude that is the root of the problem. Yes, it's a chauvinistic approach but 40/50 years ago the girls did cooking and/or sewing and the boys did metal and/or woodworking. Not the most equal way of doing things but at least it gives the time to develop some practical skills in a more limited scope. If everyone does everything they become purely theoretical desk subjects and no one has any skills in anything.

Everyone that frames this as an impossible time slicing problem is being disingenuous. It is a veiled appeal to inaction and incompetence. We teach a stripped down curriculum, often badly and inefficiently. I work in a school and see this every day.

Yet somehow, kids who speak the same language in other countries outpace our academic achievement. Somehow, kids who went to the literal same school 30+ years ago got a better math and science education.

We need to move past our current, largely failed education system. We need to do that incrementally, iteratively, and rapidly. We need to invest the same resources in ourselves and our own future citizens that we need to allow them to succeed(as they used to, and do elsewhere). Instead, we increased class sizes, cut school days, closed campuses, and cut subject matter. We teach to the bottom of classes, and expect teachers to dictate learning materials to students who aren't held to the expectation of completing assigned reading or work before class. And somehow providing individualized instruction or pushing outside traditional school hours seems to be anathema.

You can't do all that wrong and have good outcomes. Your strongest kids may still succeed, but then they do so in spite of you, not because the rest were weak. As to your intentionally sexist and ignorant gender stereotypes, sell it somewhere else. I have a framed picture of Grace Hopper in my office. I suspect many of the locals here may have more egalitarian views of the role of women in tech and science, as well of a better grasp of the history of computing and mathematics. Feel free to move to Afghanistan if you disagree.

Society has lost along with each individual that was denied the chance to reach their potential. Few men have made more than a few great discoveries in their lives, and we discourage women doing the same to our loss and our shame.

"The US reportedly has over 700,000 computing-related jobs a year and only 80,000 computer science graduates. The tech industry has to hire high-skilled immigrants to fill these positions. If more people from the country can code, it'll keep the US more nationally competitive."

Perhaps if the USA "recycled" older IT personnel into 2nd tier, but still required/useful positions, said country wouldn't have this supposedly perennial issue...Everyone wants the shinny new CS grads one day post-graduation (jobs prospects seem to gradually degrade decade-by-decade after that).

I worked in financial IT until age 64 // then couldn't even find a tech support position. Hmmm. But yeah, I lasted a lot longer in IT than most

and we should invest in lifetime learning for anyone who is willing to put the work in. We shouldn't just be relegating the IT old timers to 2nd string positions. We should be training non-IT retirees that need income to re-enter the workforce. Plenty of people that hung up their spurs because their main career wasn't suited to older folks. I can probably teach a HVAC installer to do 75% of our help desk stuff from their den, and never have to lift a 450lb AC core on a roof in triple digit heat. Win win as far as I am concerned.

I'm all for introducing students to coding, and I think we have some good ways to do it, but if they think only about writing programs, they'll miss what the true basics are. Before you can write a good program, you have to have some better understanding of the systems you're interacting with, and for those who don't want to write code after all, those skills are very transferable. Students should have more understanding of how the systems they use are running, the ways to modify them, and the risks they bring with them. If we make sure they have a good basis in this, they'll also end up writing better code.

We waste years of kids learning time because their teachers don't grasp basic math, logic and programming concepts. A 2nd grader doesn't know that variables aren't basic arithmetic. They won't be ready for algebra or calculus for years, but they can handle the concepts it's build on. Same for boolean logic, elementary set theory, etc. So you throw out actual code for a few more grades, and teach them to break down tasks into a series of logical steps.

Instead we put that stuff off for years, and wonder why so many students struggle with the transition to more advanced math. Because their their teachers thought math was arithmetic, and that's what they teach. I've taught basic programming, and tutored it. The students that struggle the most are the ones who were never exposed to the basic logical concepts before hand, and end up starting their freshman year, a decade behind their peers in other parts of the world.

The last key to this is teaching teachers. Believe me, it's harder than you think. To many of them actively resist anything that isn't packaged as an academic conference, and loaded with the latest buzzwords. But at least with tech they are receptive towards pre-packaged material in the lower graded, so if the industry can package something digestible, it may be easier to push.

The cynics among us always interpret such efforts as a mechanism to bring down the wages in the tech industry. On a more serious side the question is, what should young students be taught? They already know how to use computers or smart phones, many of them are better in basic computer skills, playing games, trouble shooting stuff. Kids are usually much faster and smarter about such things because they treat trouble shooting tasks as a game. The next level of ``computer science" is probably to learn how to make a powerpoint presentation or to build a website or a youtube video. All these things have over the years become easier and easier. There are no real computer science skills needed for such basic things. Computer science really starts with learning about logic, about processes, data structures, geometry, algebra (most programs use variables which can take numerical values like in algebra) etc. Most of it is some sort of math. In order to be able to program effectively, you need to be able to think mathematically. Effective programs are written by minds who have learned how to think analytically. I hope these Tech bosses do not hope that schools over the country teach how to copy paste already written code. A much more reasonable and constructive call is to improve and value more math education. Of course this can and should include elements of computer science.

It's the problem that CS has been trying to get out from under for 50 years :)

You can and need to teach math, science, and foundational logic together. Not as separate subjects, and not just as a history lesson. Logic and math are a "how" and science is a "what" and a "why". Couple that with a focus on problem solving and you get better traction. Kids will absorb a little dry math and science history at a time, but then their eyes glaze over.

Show them a shitty robot they can program, you can hold their attention a little longer. Just having a computer isn't novel anymore, but the same ideas work. How many old timers still remember LOGO? Now we have Sphero's, Minecraft, and a dozen other things. The trick is to un-buzzword them and un-gamify them and make sure there is a kernel of real learning there. That takes teaching the teachers though.