I Just Learned That They Don't Teach Cursive Writing In Schools These Days.....

[Chan790]

73. I can put it like this.

I'm mostly self-taught on the computer...I was a child of the 1980s and even the Macs we had in the school were primarily thought of as an educational fad that would pass. So we got maybe 30 total hours of computer education per year through elementary school...about 45 minutes per school week for the entire classroom. I taught myself to code. I'm generally far more computer savvy than my peers. (HS Class of 1998)

My youngest brother was just seven years behind me in school...by that time, they had started to realize how important computing would really be and had increased the amount of computing time to approximately 2-3 hours/week per student. Basic programming and computing was a core-curriculum item starting in 2nd grade, along with foreign languages. (Learning competencies in these areas are linked...the sooner in life you begin learning either foreign languages or computing languages, the better you will do in both and the better you will retain knowledge in either field.) He has a natural aptitude with computing and understanding technology that it would take an average adult more than 15,000 hours of education and experience to catch-up with him. The difference in education has changed how they process and understand information...it just comes easier to him and his peers than it will ever come to us. He's not a savant, that's the median of his educational peers. He's also natively-fluently bilingual in English, Spanish and Russian, with passing fluency in 4 other languages (Greek, Serbian, Japanese, German) that he just kind of picked up, seemingly through osmosis. (HS Class of 2005)

If your school officials think like you think...your children will be left behind in the world of tomorrow. Computerized integration of whole-life experience is the direction society is going in. Computing is not an optional core-curriculum area...it's probably the most important one, right up there with math, science and slightly ahead of reading or writing. (None of them can be viewed as remotely optional...for that matter neither are humanities, but those tend to be neglected.) You've mistaken computing as a substitute for critical thinking when computing-integrated learners are generally better critical-thinkers and better analytical thinkers than those whose educations are more classically-aligned. (like yours or mine)