[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).