| > "Aww isn't that cute! A musician/artist having an intellectual idea that isn't completely terrible -- like a quaint little animal trying to imitate us true intellectuals up here in our high tower of superiority." I exaggerate, but this is basically the elitist mentality I perceive behind the actual quote. Am I way off base here? I get the impression that this comment has more to do with contrasting will.i.am's statement with the other statements on code.org for effect than it has to do with specifically putting down will.i.am. With this comment, the linked piece seems to be implying that the statements made by Zuckerberg, Clinton et al are inspired by wrongheaded beliefs about the purpose of education, and that only will.i.am's statement comes anywhere close to hitting the right tone. I read this comment as genuinely complimentary, albeit weak. As I read it, Bret Victor's critique of code.org is more nuanced than the usual complaints: it stems from a disagreement with code.org's implicit claim that programming should be taught in schools because programming is currently a high-value skill, in terms of the amount of money you can earn by doing it professionally. He seems to think that school shouldn't be primarily about training people to be "useful" to employers or the government in the short term. I'm somewhat inclined to agree. > To me, this comes off as a desperate attempt to defame this movement because it threatens to demote the status of basic technology roles from "elite magic" to "basic literacy" -- and to some people, apparently that's not an amazing social good, but a terrifying prospect of power loss. Am I way off base here in perceiving this? In the context of Victor's body of work (which is focused more or less entirely on making the incredible power of computers more accessible to more people), I have a hard time believing that any such motivation underlies the linked piece. While I think there definitely exists such a motivation in other criticisms of the learn-to-code meme, I don't think it has much to do with Victor's critiques. |
> He seems to think that school shouldn't be primarily about training people to be "useful" to employers or the government in the short term. I'm somewhat inclined to agree.
I entirely agree; it's something I've been trying to point out for a few years now.
Something people don't recognize about, say, feminist theory on agency and objectification is that it's a subject that applies everywhere. In this case, it's the objectification of people in general as tools for businesses and governments, rather than as individuals with their own particular needs and desires with intrinsic worth. We're uninterested in discussing what a student wants to learn and instead prefer discussing a paternalistic notion of what a student ought to be required to learn.
For some reason, we've lost the vocabulary for discussing things outside of an economic context. It's probably because bringing up questions of morality is scary: between the polarizing force of political religion and the lack of education in forming one's own moral and ethical system, moral claims find little traction unless they're merely repeating something with wide support.