Veteran educators Shaheer Faltas and Kate Nicholson explain why little children should not be taught coding and computer science.
Although they write about kindergarten children, the basic principles are the same for very young children of 6 and 7. They may enjoy playing on the computer but take care not to start direct instruction and career preparation for little children. I am not sure when children should start preparing for the computer age, but what they write sounds reasonable to me. What do you think?
They write:
“President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos intend to prioritize science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education by making available $200 million in grants and recommend that coding and computer science skills be taught in K-12 schools across the nation. Though the intention to improve K-12 education is admirable, doubling down on technology in America’s kindergarten classrooms is not the answer.
“As a lifelong educator now running a school in Mill Valley within the orbit of Silicon Valley, and a parent who writes regularly about education, we have daily insight into what tomorrow’s leaders need in order to walk confidently into the future — and it’s not the development of skills like coding.
“All across the country, experienced educators will tell you that putting more digital devices into the hands of young, impressionable children won’t take them where we want them to go. Rather, it will leave students adrift in a sea of obsolescence.
“A quick glimpse at a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which lists the fastest declining occupations for 2014 to 2024, demonstrates why pushing a narrow skill set — like computer coding — into our youngest grades is unwise. Over the past two decades, entire industries have been gutted by technological advances that were impossible to predict.
”Instead of prioritizing technology first, we need to teach students how to think and adapt, how to communicate and ask questions. Childhood is a cherished, sacred time — one for sparking imagination.
“Indeed, the purpose of K-12 education has expanded beyond offering just content and now entails equipping students with life skills. Elementary school is where the basic foundations of character are built, where self-control takes shape, and where students begin to perceive of themselves as part of a larger community.”
A womderful article!
Let children be children. Defend childhood.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hello? Being able to code is a minor skill that may soon disappear. (What will AIs be good at? Coding.) Being able to communicate, get along with others, learn respect for those around you, and myriad other things the young learn in early schooling are much more important.
These impulses are faddish in the extreme. And early exposure to something does not guarantee learning. A study in Sweden on children learning English showed that learners in sixth grade who started in first grade could not be distinguished from those who started in third grade. So many of our assumptions are unproven beliefs that prove to be counterproductive when we finally get around to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
“So many of our assumptions are unproven beliefs that prove to be counterproductive when we finally get around to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.”
Quite correct, Steve. Even “proven” assumptions, eh!
I believe morals, values, ethics, kindness, fairness are the things young children need to be taught. I feel I have worked hard to teach these things to my own children, but they have been “untaught” by some of the adults they are surrounded by in school. Technology aside, trying to cope with consistent unfairness does more damage to a child than whether or not and what ages technology is introduced. Having to do it over again, I would have delayed the introduction of devices even beyond the time I did because I feel it has made my children less social, intuitive and productive, in general.
Janice,
“I feel I have worked hard to teach these things to my own children, but they have been “untaught” by some of the adults they are surrounded by in school.”
I won’t deny what your feelings are. But what you state is, in my eyes, a quite damning statement. Would you please explain, elaborate further. Gracias, Duane
All young children need the skills mentioned. They also need play to develop them. Early childhood children need hands on experiences as well to develop their gross and fine motor skills. When I taught PreK and K the computer was used for “research” by the adults with the children looking in and only for some occasional“play” by the end of the year .
The whole assumption that coding should be taught in kindergarten is a symptom of how much the tech oligarchs have poisoned our thinking. Coding has no relevance to the young child who needs to learn through his senses through hands-on experiences.
The tech giants and Silicon Valley workers opt to put their own children in play only preschool co-opts and in Waldorf type K-8 schools with little or no technology, and they don’t allow their children to have phones and devices until the teen years. What’s good for the goose is NOT good for the gander.
Reblogged this on Mister Journalism: "Reading, Sharing, Discussing, Learning".
There is no “tech” in kindergarten. Kindergarten= children’s garden.
Even a kindergartener knows that.
Remember a year ago when Bill Gates visited Trump Tower and said Donald could be a great president, the likes of John F. Kennedy? We were shocked that he would say something like that to us, the public. But that statement wasn’t for us; it was for Trump to hear. Very slick. Turns out it was part of Silicon Valley’s push to have the Trump administration keep HB-1 visas alive and lowering wages for skilled labor. The tech industry spends more money on lobbying than does Wall Street. They are pushing to lower wages so they don’t have to pay so much for its tech engineers. Silicon Valley wants more coders so they don’t have to pay coders as much.
They push for diverse groups that are underrepresented and underpaid in tech firms to learn a skill in school that will make them more likely to apply for a job with a tech firm. Duly note that the White House is NOT encouraging tech firms to hire a more diverse workforce or to pay them more fairly. Instead, they take time and money away from more meaningful education programs to teach groups of diversity skills that racist, sexist tech firms want. The tech firms will later discriminate against them because of their gender and/or skin color. Throwing the lambs to the wolves.
Teaching female and Black/Latino students computer and coding skills is like teaching LGBT students the skills they need to work at Hobby Lobby. Doing it in kindergarten just makes it all the more ridiculous.
Sorry, I missed a grammatical error in there.
The concept we call childhood today did not exist for most children until 1938 when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act.
I think it is obvious, that Betsy DeVos, supported by Trump, his followers, the Eva Moskowitzes of the corporate charter industry, and the GOP all have a goal to get rid of that concept of childhood that was redefined in 1938, and return to the era when children were not considered children but cheap labor easy to manipulate and control.
Before 1938, children as young as 7 could even be sold into prostitution by their often poor parents.
“But in the early 20th century, the word “teen-ager” either didn’t exist or was scarcely used outside of development psychology. Since the term applies to a group of youngish people who hang out together, their invention required an insulated environment where teens could behave, well, teenagery. Teens didn’t create “high school.” High schools created “teenagers.”
As the U.S. economy shifted from a disparate agrarian society to a mass production machine, families relocated closer to cities and, at least initially, many sent their children to work. The movement to prevent kids from being forced to toil in mills encouraged compulsory education for teenagers. In 1920, just 28 percent of American youths between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were in high school. By 1930, 47 percent of this age group was attending high school. As young people spent more time in school, they developed their own customs in an environment away from work and family, and the possibility of a distinct teenage subculture became possible. It’s hard to imagine a teenage culture in an economy where every 16-year-old is expected to work with his father on the lathe, or in the fields.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/america-in-1915/462360/
the federal minimum wage was enacted during the Roosevelt administration in 1938 under the Fair Labor Standards Act. At the time, employers were required to pay a minimum of $0.25/hour, which works out to $4.06/hour in inflation-adjusted (2012) dollars.
The female physicians I know who have young children are upset with all that online stuff in schools.
I too have written about technology and education. I agree that young kids should not be taught coding but I go all of the way and say not in k-12, with the possible exception of some seniors in high school, if they’ve had at least some the mathematics first. Coding is not computer science. It is a very small part of it. Computer Science is like all sciences just applied mathematics. Computer science is heavily applied mathematics — more than most.
By the way the term STEM is silly. It is overly redundant. Science, Engineering, and Technology are just applied mathematics, so we are talking about pure and applied mathematics which is just mathematics.
Children have not had the mathematics yet and will not get it until college.
One of the biggest reasons besides personal development of the young is a practical one. There is no STEM Shortage.
When people say we have a STEM shortage they are talking about Computer Science. We did have a Computer Science shortage in the 1960s through perhaps the 1980s. Computer science was a fledgling discipline then and Pres. Kennedy used a number of mathematicians and engineers to program for the Space Race– to get us to the Moon.
There are at least six organizations that say there is no STEM shortage.
They are: The Center for Immigration Studies, The IEEE Organization, Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the Rand Corporation, the Urban Institute, and the National Research Council. In fact, the Rand Corporation went as far back as 1990 and concluded that there was no STEM shortage that far back.
So, why do people keep pushing this outdated notion?
I recently read where fully 1/3 of all Computer Science will never get a software job. We have a glut of Computer Science graduates and college graduates in general. More and more Computer Science jobs are becoming the gig variety. So, that these graduates will need maybe 20 jobs in their lifetimes. These gig jobs last 1-2 years on average. Of course age discrimination starts at age 35, so good luck with getting new job after that.
Teaching kids to code, which again, is not programming really, will not necessarily lead to more computer science majors and graduates, any more than teaching them to write will produce more writers as adults.
It is unethical to push kids in any one direction at all. Computer Science should be a calling, as all college occupations should be. The kids should want to do it not because someone pushed them into it but because the actually like to do it. They have the personality type that suits them for STEM occupations and this they are with born with or develop prior to school. I go for the former.
In fact college should not be pushed at all.
More than 50% of adults say that they would do something else if they could do it all over again. In other words they were not happy doing their job. We have somewhere near that percentage that change their majors or go two year before declaring a major. Why is this? Could it be because they were pushed into? Probably.
By the way Obama pushed the day of coding or some such nonsense too. So it not just Republican party pushing this.
Well said. Thank you.
As a K1 special ed teacher, I lose hope everyday. Though we only had two days last week with all this snow, we already have tests driving our instruction. Where my kids have finally gotten into a routine of going to the music and art and media room, that routine gets changed once again next week. Resource will be in the classrooms. Why? Because the MAP tests will be using our resource rooms. WIDA has already begun for our hispanic students. PALs is supposed to begin. After January, we have maybe two months before doing it all again and then everything is SOL. If more parents would just OPT-OUT that would send a statement. But no one tells them of this option.
Our children have already lost.
“. . . then everything is SOL.”
YEP! Shitout of Luck, eh!
As someone who teaches coding concepts to his kindergarten students, I think most of you are out of touch and don’t really understand what coding is and how it relates to other areas.
Coding doesn’t have to be taught on an electronic device. I teach concepts to my students using physical activities and board games.
Coding doesn’t have to be an individual activity. My students work much better on coding activities at all grade levels when they are working collaboratively. Coding can be a lot like problem solving and it gets them talking to each other and solving problems together.
Coding is play. Our kids play differently than we did just as we play differently than our own parents did. You are doing your students a disservice by trying to force them to live in your own childhood. Yes Kindergarten should be about play, and physical movement, and interacting with others and learning how to function in a group, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be exactly the same experience you had as a child.
We don’t teach coding to prepare them for a job in computer programming. Why do people keep brining up that most students won’t go into technology fields when they graduate? Most students won’t use the science we teach them or the math or the foreign languages either. Our job is not to train them for their future career, it’s to create well rounded adults. To ignore a potential field because you don’t see the value in it is to deprive a student of a potential opportunity or interest down the road.
Please explain what “coding” is. And how and why it should be a separate subject/activity for whatever level it is being taught.’
http://lmgtfy.com/?iie=1&q=What+is+coding%3F
You forgot to answer the how and why questions.
I think I’ve made my point. I’m not going to lay out my curriculum in a blog post because you posted a contrarian response which amounted to, “I don’t believe you. Prove it.”
I use technology with K-4 students successfully. It doesn’t take away from any other aspect of their day any more than sending them to art of music does. We teach it because part of our job is to adapt to our students always changing environment.
Teaching children to code computer programs is a waste of time, a total waste of time and talent. If computer coding is offered as a class, it should be in high school as an elective so it is the student’s choice.
Instead, the focus should be on teacher education/training and support and not on high stakes rank and punish testing.
The Myth of America’s Tech-Talent Shortage
“Colleges, for instance, are already minting far more programmers and engineers than the job market is absorbing. Roughly twice as many American undergraduates earn degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines than go on to work in those fields. As shown in the EPI graph below, in 2009 less than two thirds of employed computer science grads were working in the IT sector a year after graduation.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth-of-americas-tech-talent-shortage/275319/
Your focus K-4 should be to foster a joy of reading and teach children to be life-long learners, not coders.
Defensive contrarian pot meet kettle black, eh.
“Your focus K-4 should be to foster a joy of reading and teach children to be life-long learners, not coders.”
Why does our focus have to be a single thing? Should we not teach them art or music because it’s not reading? What about learning to code is not a part of being a life-long learner? When I was in elementary school we had cooking, shop, and gardening classes? Was that a waste of time?
Again, we’re not trying to prepare them for a job. We’re teaching them skills and habits that are not exclusive to technology. You may not understand it but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.
Do NOT change the subject
I said nothing about NOT teaching them art or music, cooking or gardening. Those few examples you used to change the subject are necessary for everyday life. We all eat and gardening teaches us how we are connected to the earth and where our food comes from. But, as you will discover before the end of this comment, those subjects are on the list of electives just like coding should be.
Art, music, cooking, and gardening all support the joy of reading. But we don’t teach children how to write music for an orchestra. In school, band and chorus is an elective students join because they want to so we offer it to them.
But coding is tedious, repetitive, mindless and boring except to those individuals that love it. So coding should be a choice offered as an elective.
I remember as a child still in K-12 being forced to lea5rn how to code and my brain wasn’t designed to learn that crap. Again, coding should be an elective.
But cooking is an essential part of life and health.
Here’s a list on Prep Scholar.com of elective subjects in the schools
Home economics and nutrition are listed as electives but I argue they are much more important than coding. Performing Arts is also on that list of electives.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/complete-list-of-high-school-electives
I’m not changing the subject. You made a broad statement about coding based on your personal feelings and I compared it to other subjects that don’t pertain to most people’s chosen profession. I eat but I don’t know how to grow food in a garden. I know lots of people who need repairs done on their house but don’t know how to swing a hammer. We have people who are paid to do those things for us and for many of them, they started to learn those skills in school. Why should coding be any different aside from the fact that you find it boring? Why can an art teacher support the reading curriculum but a technology teacher can’t? Do you think we’re just playing pac man?
“But coding is tedious, repetitive, mindless and boring except to those individuals that love it.”
I have students who feel the same way about art and music. I have a number of students and friends for whom technology is a form of expression.
Do you think coding should be mandatory for every child starting in kindergarten?
I think coding should only be an elective in high school. I made my case and you repeatedly shifted and changed the subject just like Trump and the GOP does.
No one is shifting the subject. You, Diane and Duane made broad negative statements (more Trump-like than anything I’ve written by the way) and I applied your logic to other subjects we have been teaching in public schools for decades to prove a point. Technology instruction is just as important as music, art, and physical education.
If a district has the resources and the time to teach technology to their students, then I think they absolutely should. No one said anything about mandatory. Currently the only specials/elective subject that is mandatory in Illinois, where I teach, is P.E. and even that gets a waiver in many districts.
I’m laughing. Stick to the subject. I repeat, stick to the subject. The subject was teaching children coding. The subject was not alleged bias by Google and all the other attempts to divert the focus off of the subject.
Again, do you want it to be mandatory to teach all children coding starting in grade school as early as kindergarten?
I think it is okay to offer coding classes as electives in high school and that is it. There is no need to teach grade school children how to code computer programs. That is a waste of valuable classroom time for the early grades.
Coding is not art.
Coding is not music.
Coding is not PE.
Coding is not even close to having all children read stories they enjoy reading to foster a love of reading, and reading is the most important skill to develop a lifelong learner. Once a child loves to read, they become a lifelong learner.
I doubt that falling in love with coding, if that is even possible for most if not all children, comes even close to turning a child into someone that loves to read.
The only one trying to change the subject here is you. You keep trying to insert the word MANDATORY into my argument when it’s never anything I suggested. You also boil kindergarten down to fostering a love of reading as if that’s the only thing that Kindergarten, or even elementary school, is about.
Coding is not Gym or Art or Music. That’s correct. I never said it was. But Art and Music and Gym also aren’t reading which again seems to be the only thing you want our kids to get out of school. In my first post which I’m not even sure you read, I explained why coding is a valuable skill to teach to all ages. Go back and read it again. I don’t claim to be teaching them to create computer programs just like when we teach students to write we’re not teaching them to write novels. Coding is a skill just like any of the other skills we teach our students.
You clearly have a bias against technology. That’s fine. No one is making you use it and it wasn’t around when you were a kid (I’d love to see that school you claim was boring you with code in the 60s when “affordable” computer systems didn’t become available for schools until the 80s) so I can understand why you might not be as comfortable with it as a 6 year old is but that doesn’t mean our students who are living in a world vastly different from the one you grew up in shouldn’t be exposed to it, learn how it works, and learn how to use it responsibly.
You can disagree all you want but on Tuesday morning I’m still going to walk into a classroom and lessons embedded with technology to my K-4 students. You are welcome to pout in the corner while I do so.
“But Art and Music and Gym also aren’t reading which again seems to be the only thing you want our kids to get out of school.”
There you go again, changing the subject and not answering my question. I never said reading was the only thing I wanted children to get out of school but teaching children to enjoy reading should be taught across the curriculum — even in art and PE.
You said, “In my first post which I’m not even sure you read, I explained why coding is a valuable skill to teach to all ages.”
No, I didn’t read your first comment and I’m not going to.
My question was simple: Do you think teaching coding should be mandatory for all children?
Did you answer that with “I explained why coding is a valuable skill to teach to all ages”?
If so, you still didn’t say if you wanted that coding skill to be mandatory to all ages or just offered as an individual choice.
What you teach in your classroom is your choice as a teacher if you are given that amount of freedom over what you teach, but it should not be mandatory for every teacher and every child k – 12. Teaching children to code should be up to the teacher or up to the child through an elective — not mandatory.