[hogFeast]

Just my 2c but this is one of the worst ideas.

First, this was designed by politicians who I am sure everyone on this sub would hate (basically, the Brexit boys). The stated aim was to be more elitist: make subjects much harder, encourage smart children...and dumb children...well...sorry, if you are dumb when we test you at 11 then you will be digging ditches.

Second, the logic for this came from people who had never taught in schools. Again, the people above declared war on teachers. And then took advice on how to educate children from people who had only worked in tertiary education (I actually support a lot of the principles but the implementation has been beyond dire, and loaded with corruption).

Third, try explaining programming without computers to a child. There are so many abstract concepts...it is just insane. I understand why an academic thinks this is a good idea. More jobs for the boys. But it still makes no sense.

Fourth, this feeds into the aspect of British culture that reveres irrelevant knowledge (and despises practice). Nowhere is this more evident that in CS departments. Example: the UK has great CS depts but no innovation within business. The university local to me has a top ML department, they have been doing speech recognition since the 60s...all the PHds leave, there is only one speech recognition startup in the city...and that is govt-funded afaik. Taking advice from people like the OP is suicidal.

[Feint1]

> I understand why an academic thinks this is a good idea. More jobs for the boys.

This isn't fair. Academics usually have a true love of their subject and desire to teach that to the next generation.

>Third, try explaining programming without computers to a child. There are so many abstract concepts...it is just insane.

They teach many abstract concepts. The current curricula for many subjects are already full of abstract ideas that we expect children to learn. Programming is basically functions, logic and basic algebra. It's not remotely difficult to teach these to children.

>Fourth, this feeds into the aspect of British culture that reveres irrelevant knowledge (and despises practice). Nowhere is this more evident that in CS departments. Example: the UK has great CS depts but no innovation within business. The university local to me has a top ML department, they have been doing speech recognition since the 60s...all the PHds leave, there is only one speech recognition startup in the city...and that is govt-funded afaik. Taking advice from people like the OP is suicidal.

I think this is wrong. Developing strong theoretical understanding is not pointless. You can't have innovation without theory. I agree that maybe the country needs to apply that academic kowledge better to money making endeavours, but I don't believe that keeping the education system as it is now is going to help. We need more numerate people with detailed knowledge of scientific disciplines in order to drive innovation.

[the_af]

Agreed. Besides, SPJ is not advocating teaching without computers at all. He just discusses de-emphasizing the "cool tech" aspect of CS, but also says that completely excluding computers wouldn't be much fun.

The relevant slide states about programming (and computers and tech):

    - Crucial, motivating, and "ground truth".
    - But also seductive, distracting, and risks excessive focus on technology details

It's hard for me to disagree with either claim.

SPJ is also not talking about "irrelevant knowledge without practice". I won't reiterate all his points, because that's what the lecture is for, but he stresses the practical parts as well as the theoretical parts, and he never claims CS should be taught "without practice".

[hogFeast]

Whether he is advocating it or not, this is essentially how things have turned out. In the UK, they are examining on DS&A for 16 year olds. Yes, there is a "programming" module but there is no actual content...the questions are: "how do you declare a variable", "what is the difference between for/while", and about different paradigms (these aren't taught in themselves, you just need to know what they are).

Btw, to be totally clear: the reason why this doesn't work is because we have been here before. The majority of the UK's leaders grow up doing whatever they think is valuable, and can totally disregard what other people need/want. The idea of practical knowledge makes no sense. You see this in CS courses that have no programming (again, my city has a very good CS dept...turns out grads who have only written a few hundred lines in their life). And it happens in a ton of other courses.

I get the idea of knowledge for it's own sake is very important for some people. But, again, look at the practice...this is how it is has turned out.

[hogFeast]

That is a very generous interpretation of academics. In the UK, academics are notoriously militant (i.e. they strike pretty much constantly, have a huge media/lobbying profile...they aren't like the BMA but they are definitely up there). Even if you are going beyond nationality, it is a fairly well understood aspect of human nature that, in tertiary education, there is a tendency to teach whatever the teacher finds fun. The more arcane, the better (CS/Econ are the biggest areas for this).

And the problem isn't that the ideas are abstract. But that they are abstract relative to what the task actually is. It is like teaching a cookery course but not doing any cooking. And presumably, you are saying that it isn't difficult to teach these things because you know that? I can tell you it is false because many CS universities in the UK don't manage to produce grads that can program...easy though...amirite?

I didn't say it was pointless. I implied it was pointless to teach to children. And you are right, we need significantly less professors and significantly more doers. The UK has a massive quantity of people with immense talent wasting their lives with arcanum. The only value produced is in teaching this stuff other people...that isn't useful knowledge. Trying to control that process by brainwashing children based on what you think is valuable knowledge is not only a disturbing pattern of thought, it is utterly pointless. We have had this system (the UK civil service used to hire based on knowledge of Greek/Latin), it doesn't work. Give people useful knowledge, give them opportunity to innovate, and they will get on with it themselves. The problem we have is that we encourage people to waste their lives at universities (I say this as someone with postgrad degrees btw...you can learn useful things but the most useful thing is actually using your skills to help other people).

[arel]

Very valid points!

It smacks of transplanting a rose-tinted view of 1950s academia into schools.

Teaching students in a modern school environment is a world apart from academia.

Also, entirely predictable down-voting, I imagine from engineers who have no experience of teaching.

[Ericson2314]

At least in America, these views are necessary to push against for-profit faux trade school blather. The Krishnamurthi stuff referenced in the leading comment which is quite similar has been actually studied; there is evidence it is a better curriculum.

Perhaps we need trade schools too, but primary education should not be that.

Also, it's not all abstract nonsense without computers. Learning to hand-evaluate functional programs is perfectly reasonable, and no more tedious than long arithmetic by hand. I've seen students treat the implemenation like a black box, when the interpeter algorith is not complicated, which I highly doubt is good for pedagogy. (Though, as I have not studied education, I've leave that at "highly doubt".)

And finally, completely separate from the above, it's good to avoid computers for focus/attention reasons in many classroom settings. Even if they somehow could speed up learning, until we've worked out all the psychological effects of bright fast moving screens and stuff, I can't say I mind the good ol' paper and pencil that every teacher knows well.

[dboreham]

Careful there: long arithmetic probably isn't a great example, since it has no purpose to someone with a calculator -- it would be better to spend the time teaching number theory, no? And, I believe it's important to convey that "this method really only makes sense if you have a computer". Nothing turns students off like mechanical wrote method learning.

[Ericson2314]

Everyone should know how to hand-substitute lambdas and do arithmetic slowly. We should skip all the rote crap to make people faster.

[dang]

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[hogFeast]

But commenting about commenting on voting on comments is interesting?

Law firms should hire from this site. Utter goldmine.

[dang]

Well, the moderation comments are a special case. They're out-of-band feedback signals. In case it helps, they're even more tedious to write than they are to read. Yes they break the guidelines too, in the way that many medicines are toxic, but one uses them when there's no better alternative.

Alas, the system doesn't fix this without moderation. It hasn't yet become self-correcting [1], which is why I'm still doing it [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605892

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505041