coding in schools

Let's pause before drinking the 'coding in schools' Kool-Ai

‘Coding’s advocates argue that children need to learn the skill or risk being left behind in the future workforce. But, they are wrong (or probably wrong) both about the future and about the need for coding to become a basic skill alongside literacy and numeracy.’ Photograph: Andrey Prokhorov/Getty Images

Teaching coding to school students has won some pretty heavyweight supporters over the past couple of weeks. Bill Shorten, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott now all think students from primary school upwards should be taught to code – getting little fingers busy with C++ or Python is becoming something of a political cause celebre in Australia. But as always, it’s worth a pause to think before taking a large gulp of the Kool-Aid.

“Coding is the literacy of the 21st century,” Shorten said in his budget reply speech. Malcolm Turnbull, not to be outdone, the next day said: “If we want to succeed, and continue to succeed as a prosperous first-world economy ... the key tool for that is coding.”

And now Tony Abbott, despite ridiculing the idea at first (“Does he want to send them all out to work at the age of 11?” he asked), has jumped on the coding bandwagon.

Coding’s advocates argue that children need to learn the skill or risk being left behind in the future workforce. In the dystopian society they envisage, machines have taken over most jobs and humans are left idle – except for those who know how to code. But, they are wrong (or probably wrong) both about the future and about the need for coding to become a basic skill alongside literacy and numeracy.
Way back in 1993, when I was starting high school, a teacher of mine boldly predicted that learning to type was a waste of time because, by the time we left school, voice recognition would have replaced typing. Now, while voice recognition is available and works, sort of (take Siri for example), he was obviously talking out of his hat. Every decent job I have had has been in front of a keyboard. Typing at 100wpm would have been a pretty useful skill. In fact, typing is now taking over from handwriting in schools. Finland, one of the insufferable overachievers of the education world, is now phasing out handwriting classes in favour of keyboard skills.

Predicting the future is always a mug’s game, but even more so in education.

In the late 80s/early 90s, a generation of schoolchildren, including me, were taught Japanese. The country at that time was an economic titan, and the fastest growing source of trade and foreign investment in Australia. It was a safe bet that learning Japanese would be a valuable skill, but for the rest of the decade Japan fell into a decade of economic malaise – and while still being a useful skill, learning Japanese was no ticket to instant prosperity. 

It’s possible that teaching coding could fall into a similar trap. What is a valuable skill in the workforce right now may not be in 20 years. In the absence of being able to accurately predict which skills will be in demand in the future workforce, surely it makes more sense to build broad generalist skills of numeracy and literacy in the early years, rather than concentrate on the narrower skill of coding.

The New York Times columnist and Nobel prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, recently wrote that a growing number of economists are wondering whether the technology revolution has been greatly overhyped – one great big “meh” in other words. Technology was supposed to bring us liberation from mundane labour, but instead we are as occupied as ever with work; and despite technological innovation surging forward, productivity and wages growth are stagnating in most of the western world. Malcolm Turnbull’s claim that coding is the key tool to unlock future prosperity for Australia might sound visionary, but it’s not supported by the economic data. 

But, as many coding supporters point out, what is the damage of teaching the skill to students if in fact the predictions that we are on the edge of a new machine age dominated by 3D printing and artificial intelligence come true? Shouldn’t we arm our students with that knowledge just in case?

Well, as Krugman writes: “talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues.” 

In education, that includes issues such as failing schools, poor teaching quality, lack of specialist support for students with a disability, the increasing shift away from comprehensive publicly funded schools to private education, poor international rankings in literacy and numeracy, and countless other real, and very difficult issues, that confront Australia’s education system.

Sorting out those problems will take much more than a few lines of code. 

Some kids will certainly grow up and want to learn coding, either in high school or universities, but the best way to ensure they can do this is to offer a decent, broad-based education in the early years. Others may not want to learn coding, and that’s because they’ll be onto learning something else, something that we haven’t even heard of yet – and no amount of predicting the future and hothousing them in today’s most desirable skills will get them ready for whatever that may be.