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December 15, 2013 02:00 am GMT

Code Literacy Doesnt Need To Come At The Expense Of Other Skills

codeThis week President Barack Obama rekindled a couple of the Internet’s favorite debates: whether it’s appropriate to take selfies at funerals, and whether everyone should learn to code. As part of Computer Science Education Week, Obama delivered a YouTube address titled “President Obama calls on every American to learn code.” “Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future,” he said. “If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans like you to master the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything.” The last time we went through this was when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted that he would learn to code as part of Codecademy’s “Year of Code” in 2012, which earned a certain amount of backlash. “I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing,” Discourse co-founder and CTO Jeff Atwood wrote, suggesting that communication skills were at least as important to a well-rounded education as programming. Many other critics complained that you don’t need to learn to build an engine in order to drive a car. This time around Slate’s Matthew Yglesias complained that far too many people in the U.S. don’t know how to read English, and that spreading actual literacy should be a higher priority than spreading code literacy. I’m still on the side of pushing code literacy to as many people as possible. If everyone in the country were likely to spend a significant portion of their waking hours using faucets, and Congress was likely to debate bills that had great ramifications for the future of faucet users, then I probably would say that everyone should at least learn the basics of plumbing. And I agree with Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed, that not knowing how to code is more analogous to not only not being able to drive, but being blind folded while you ride. And while we don’t teach all of our high schoolers how to build engines, we do generally teach them the basics of physics and internal combustion as freshman. Likewise, we can’t expect to teach everyone enough programming to build Facebook, but we can make sure as many people as possible have a general idea of how it was built. But I think we can all agree that learning

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