[rayiner]

Only a tiny fraction of the population needs to understand computer science. Most people will struggle through it, learn to hate it, and immediately forget it after they graduate, just as they do with math and science. Meanwhile, college professors will have to spend inordinate amounts of time unteaching all the stupid things kids learned in K-12, because there is no way to structure these curricula in a way that serves as a good foundation for those who will actually major in the subject and is simultaneously approachable for everyone else.

Public education should serve some practical purpose: teaching kids the basic skills everyone needs to be productive in the workforce and to contribute as citizens. To that end, I'd advocate taking courses away instead of adding them. Math and science education in K-12 is a disaster and a waste of time for all but a small fraction of kids. We'd be better off taking those out, shortening mandatory education to K-10, and letting kids who actually want to go into particular fields study the relevant coursework when they're old enough to actually learn it properly.

[dragonwriter]

I disagree with your claim about the impossibility.of broadly accessible foundational CS that is still good ground for majors; not only so I think it's possible, but I think at least one viable approach already exists in How to Design Programs -- the text itself may not be ideal for secondary students (though IIRC is been used successfully at that level), but the basic method and approach for teaching computing as a core subject is sound.

[rayiner]

I'll check out that text, but I'm skeptical. We had a CS requirement for all engineering majors at Georgia Tech, and even among that group it was frustrating and largely a waste of everyone's time.

Of course, I also don't think we've succeeded in that goal with math and science either. Physics was a requirement in high school, but our physics classes in college taught everything from the ground up because god only knew what kids learned in K-12.

[harryh]

Worth considering:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-real...

[mempko]

Public education should not be about making good workforce for capitalists. It has a higher purpose.

[rayiner]

Sure, but where does math and science fit into that higher purpose? I think the focus on those is actually driven by the (futile) desire to please capitalists--because good paying jobs often require those skills. If we're talking about educating citizens, I think it'd be way more valuable to replace chemistry and physics with courses in the philosophy of science and algebra and geometry with courses in logic and statistics.

It's insane to me that we spend so much effort trying to teach kids subjects like algebra that they'll never really understand and that 95% will never use again, and we don't teach courses in European history, formal logic, or Bayesian statistics--subjects that would give kids practical insight into issues that affect them directly.

[wfo]

Uhh, I don't know what planet you're living on where people don't need to use algebra. Almost everybody I know uses algebra regularly. How do you suggest we do statistics or any kind of science or teach kids anything about the world without first teaching algebra? Formal logic is essentially a more abstract and complicated algebra which isn't useful in real life.

And understanding the world around you (science) and learning the language that the world works in (math) are worthwhile in and of themselves for every student just as general human knowledge. Removing science from the basic curriculum entirely is absurd at its face unless we allow, for example free college for everyone. It's essentially saying "the poor can't learn about the natural world".

You can't say that since sometimes teaching science to kids doesn't work we should just delete it from our entire educational program and not try. Most students get a lot out of chemistry and physics though many of them hate it. (note: often times the subject the students hate most are the ones that are most important; they hate doing hard work) They learn that mysterious phenomena are not so mysterious, they are just complicated and can be understood and controlled with some study and some mathematics and experiments. This is an invaluable lesson for students to see hands-on and cannot be removed from curricula.

I think the focus on things like tech, and people saying "not everyone needs to go to college" are driven by the desire to please capitalists.

Academic studies in logic (well, formal logic) are I think overrated as far as their ability to train students to think rigorously and carefully is concerned. Though I agree with you 100% on philosophy, and high schools already teach statistics. Informal logic and rhetoric, yes. Ethics, yes. Philosophy of <insert any subject here>, yes. Statistics, sure, once they know enough mathematics to begin to understand it.

[rayiner]

> Uhh, I don't know what planet you're living on where people don't need to use algebra. Almost everybody I know uses algebra regularly.

Yet, only 20% of those surveyed reported using even basic algebra at work, and a lot of those were tradespeople who could have easily been taught the necessary math post-K-10. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/heres-ho....

> And understanding the world around you (science) and learning the language that the world works in (math) are worthwhile in and of themselves for every student just as general human knowledge.

This is an ideological statement more than anything else. I can just as easily say it's much more important for educated citizens to learn history and philosophy, so they can understand how the social structures around them work.

> You can't say that since sometimes teaching science to kids doesn't work we should just delete it from our entire educational program and not try.

It's not clear to me that science education even works often or that adults retain anything meaningful.

> Academic studies in logic (well, formal logic) are I think overrated as far as their ability to train students to think rigorously and carefully is concerned.

I think it's a lot more useful to teach a kid that here are fallacious ways of trying to prove a point--something they can use in real life--than teaching them about the periodic table or cell division (especially since you're largely going to teach them a very dumbed down version of the latter anyway).

[wfo]

>Yet, only 20% of those surveyed reported using even basic algebra at work, and a lot of those were tradespeople who could have easily been taught the necessary math post-K-10.

I agree with you most 'work' today, especially white-collar but non-professional work is mind-numbing and empty and requires almost no skills of any kind besides a pulse. But that's just work. Have fun teaching people about their retirement plans without algebra. Balancing their budgets/checkbooks. Estimating costs of things. Understanding risk. Making decisions about anything that involves quantity. Should I have to call and pay a professional algebra-expert to understand and make decisions about my credit card? How will I know if he overcharges me?

>This is an ideological statement more than anything else. I can just as easily say it's much more important for educated citizens to learn history and philosophy, so they can understand how the social structures around them work.

Of course it's ideological; the entire project of education based on a mix of ideology and a purely a capitalist endeavor designed to provide government subsidized job training for tomorrow's workers. I absolutely agree with you about history and philosophy, but we aren't talking about removing history or philosophy from the curriculum, we are talking about removing science and mathematics. I think /every/ student should learn physics and biology and philosophy and history and rhetoric and statistics at least at a rudimentary level -- half of which require, among other things, mathematics.

Having a sense of how something generally is from what you learned a long time ago in high school is intangible but very valuable. Does it really matter where or what Asia is, or whether or not it's a continent? Does it matter whether America was founded 200 years ago or 2000 years ago? Does it matter what the Bill of Rights says? For the vast majority of people, no. But it's important to have a sense for the world as it is. The universal children's curriculum is a tiny slice of human knowledge given to everyone so that nobody is as ignorant in any topic (save perhaps subsistence farming) as the humans of 1000 years ago were. That's called progress.

>I think it's a lot more useful to teach a kid that here are fallacious ways of trying to prove a point--something they can use in real life--than teaching them about the periodic table or cell division

Informal logic and rhetoric would be a welcome addition to a curriculum that often doesn't include any sort of philosophical reasoning at all, I agree. But I think it's useful for a different reason. Argumentation is NEVER about deductive reasoning or being correct in real life, which is why formal deduction and logic is completely useless outside of a classroom -- even more useless than the periodic table or cell division. Real life is only about persuasion. And the list of logical fallacies is a list of effective persuasive techniques: if they weren't effective ways to fallaciously argue nobody would ever bother mentioning them. So I'm a little torn on teaching high school students lists of highly effective rhetorical weapons. I've seen the consequences of having them unleashed on internet commenters and the results so far are grim.

[mattmcknight]

So it's not in a child's interest to prepare them for jobs that pay well?

[rayiner]

But the dumbed-down version of science and math you get in K-12 doesn't prepare kids for those jobs anyway. Those people actually going into science and math jobs will learn "real science" and "real math" in college.

[nitrogen]

That's really just an indictment of the implementation, not the idea.

[rayiner]

Only in the same sense that instances where people died strapping wings to their arms and trying to fly are an indictment of the implementation, not the idea.

[afarrell]

> workforce for capitalists

Regardless of the reality of capitalism, work must be done in order for people to eat. That work could be actually plowing fields and picking fruit. Preferably, it is building and configuring machines to plow and pick.

Public education should be about enriching lives. A large part of that is teaching people the skills they can use to satisfy material needs.

All of this remained true under governments that humanity has so far built which strive to abolish capitalism. If you insist that we should not try to improve the human condition until we have abolished capitalism, then it is your burden to explain how to do that.

[douche]

Public education is little more than a dumping ground for children, to get them out of the way so their parents can go to work.

[afarrell]

In many places, yes. This was not the case with the public school. But I had the privilege of a mother with the time and meticulousness to build a bunch of excel spreadsheets and find a ratpoop-filled house in a rich neighborhood.

[harigov]

At a certain level, I do agree with you. However, the reason why we have such drastic differences in how people perceive and solve problems between different domains is because of specializations. They affect our abilities to communicate with each other and share ideas. True, we get stuff done and we are making progress but I don't think this is the ideal situation to be in. I don't believe any of the skills that we learn in the school are so ridiculously hard that some people cannot learn at all. I think with better teaching methodologies and more game oriented learning, we can do much better. We will be able to teach kids much faster and improve their understanding. As we push forward with our understanding of this world, having more people share a much broader base of ideas is good for the society. It's affects on the functioning of society are imperceptible but they are there, and they matter.