In discussions about jobs and the future. We sometimes make references to skills. In educational communities people speak of ‘transferable skills’ and ‘critical thinking’. Recently its become fashionable to discuss STEM. On this blog I’ve written some things about this. The following articles re-inspired my interest On Reviews in Depth:
Why everyone should learn to Program. I quote one of the most wonderful and persuasive defences of learning to program. Which goes belong learning a specialist skill:
And she felt this way because she had been given a glimpse of the way possibilities expand when freed from the constraints of the default interface. Her immediate reaction was: ”I WANT THIS”. Hence her desires opened outward in a way that was scarcely conceivable to her before. In this way does learning to code literally change your life. It frees you from the defaultism you likely never even knew you had.
The Scratch environment is a far cry from how we traditionally think of coding. For most of us who have taken or seen our friends suffer through computer science classes in college, programming is dry, time-consuming and difficult. For children using Scratch, programming is fun and creative, teaching them computational programming skills without burdening them in any way. These programming skills are necessary to understand the 21st century, where almost every single industry from construction to biotechnology to warfare involves the use of networked objects being combined to create new products and services.
As we think about jobs, and venture into an increasingly complicated world. We should not forget the motto of an Irish Educational movement ‘Educate so you can be free’. Free as it seems from the defaultism of our age.