[mich41]

Nobody assumes that children inherently dislike maths. They can't dislike something they don't even know.

The point is that children start to dislike maths once they go to school. And they do - all kids in my class either already knew basic maths before going to school or were completely bored by it.

The same will happen with programming once it will be "taught" in schools as well.

Think of it this way - if you want people equally competent as you to teach your child in school, you have to pay them 1/n of your salary, where n is the number of students in class. If you pay them less, they will find a better paid job elsewhere like you did. And you don't want n to be large since it's hard to pay attention to more that a dozen of kids at a time.

Hence, school must either consume 5% to 10% of your salary per child, or be ran by people less competent than you. It seems that usually the latter is the case.

[eru]

I appreciate your math, but it is slightly flawed.

You can get a bigger n, not by increasing class sizes alone, but also by letting teachers teach for longer per day than children learn. I.e. use you math per hour taught, not for salary.

What this means in practice is, use teachers for higher value added work, but let computers (or somebody less qualified) oversee other parts of the learning process.

What seems to work fairly well (I remember a study about it), is to let students read material at home, but solve problems in class. That's the opposite of the traditional getting lectured-at in class / exercises as homework approach.

Khan academy is another vector for leveraging teachers. It does not replace a good teacher, but it can augment a teacher.

[mich41]

The problem is that if you tell schools to implement "computer supervised" coding learning, they will tell the students to write a factorial implementation and then they'll test it for bit-perfect match with some "perfect" solution.

This way they will verify correctness, good indentation, meaningful naming of variables and so on. Because somebody in the school/government heard that this is what professionals care about.

IMO launching a media campaign which pushes schools to "teach" every child to program, without any plan prepared by professional teachers and developers and then permanent, ongoing support from such professionals, is asking for disaster. And the grandgrand...parent provided an example of such disaster.

[eru]

Oh, I was merely talking about the possible. If you are cynical enough, you will always find a way for teachers to screw it up.