Re: Not in academia
You can make a case for a lot of things being critical knowledge that everyone should learn, but for most things, it's not true. We would probably get many benefits from teaching everyone medicine. I'm not talking first aid and biology. I'm talking about proper medical school training including basic surgery, including practical application as early residents. We also live in a society where laws and contracts are important, so let's give everyone at least a year or two worth of legal training. We live in a world of many cultures, so you'll have to be fluent in at least four languages from different language families. We don't have an extra few years to have everyone do that, so we don't. I'm guessing that, like me, you don't have a medical or legal degree.
We live in a world with a lot of computers. That doesn't mean everyone has to program them. Programming is one of the things that's easier to self-train, and I know many good self-taught programmers out there. By all means we should have resources available for those who want to learn it. I'd even be happy with a mandatory small chunk in the curriculum that introduces everyone to the idea, and they can decide from that taste whether they want to continue on to more advanced work. Training everyone to be good programmers by the age of twelve, on the other hand, is elevating what we like over a lot of more important things for little benefit.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
