[ryanmolden]

My view would be that people that are interested, the most likely to pursue it as a career, don't need a requirement to drive participation. Those forced to do it like they are forced to take <insert many other subjects here> are not really likely to learn anything terribly useful, or remember it. They may cram for a test and be able to pop out a half-working FizzBuzz implementation (You're hired!!), but I suspect a year or two down the line anything learned will be forgotten and what will they have truly gained? I am all for the availability of these kinds of classes, my high school certainly did not have them, but the idea of making it required stinks of a ham-fisted way to solve the 'we don't have enough STEM graduates to compete with <insert foreign boogie-man country here>!!'. I have lots of friends outside the tech sphere, of various levels of understanding of computers. I don't know if any of them would be immediately advantaged by doing some deep dive learning course in programming over any other topic in which they lack depth. As a techie I would like to scream YES, but as a realist I am not so sure.

[Nursie]

I got into computer programming comparatively late, because it wasn't taught that it was even a thing.

I didn't know it was a career option, an academic discipline, anything. Computers were just the thing this boring woman taught us to do spreadsheets on.

At home my old C64 was something that could be programmed, sure, but I was under the impression that was basically a toy. If I hadn't had a parent who were at least interested in this stuff I would have been completely unaware.

In fact worse than that, the boring 'computer proficiency' type courses actually put me off investigating anything to do with this area. Beyond that, with the proliferation of consumption devices, the actual machine and code part of the computer is more hidden than ever before.

Computers run more and more of everything, we owe it to our kids to at least tell them that they can be programmed, and give every kid at least a small intro into how to do it.

[ryanmolden]

Yep, that why I said I supported the availability of the courses. My high school had none, as in 0, optional or not. My scepticism is around forcing kids to do things they are not interested in and the beneficial outcomes thereof. I took a lot of required classes in high school that I did not pay any attention in and could tell you basically nothing about them today. I think tech folks have a hard time understanding people's ambivalence around programming. I have a friend who is a geologist, spends his day, to the best of my understanding, studying rocks. That sounds terribly boring to me, but then again I am not a geologist, and my job probably sounds terribly boring to him. Forcing me to take that class in high school is unlikely to have changed that or given me much more of an appreciation of it.

[Nursie]

So no compulsory classes at all in school? How is one to find out which subjects are stimulating and which are not without some introduction to them?

Whilst rocks are fascinating to some, I'm not sure the analogy holds as rocks are not (more than they ever have been before) becoming a part of everyone's everyday life.

If we were living in the stone ages I would be arguing for compulsory intro-to-rocks courses :)

[randomdata]

Programming has been taught by the public education system in my jurisdiction going all the way back to my father's time (using punch cards in his day), so maybe I'm biased, but I don't see why programming should be singled out specifically. There are a lot of industries hidden in much the same way that would be equally valuable to learn about.