In a world that went digital long ago, computer science is not a staple of U.S. education, and some schools do not even offer the course, including 10 of 27 high schools in Virginia’s Fairfax County and six of 25 in Maryland’s Montgomery County….Across the Washington region’s school systems, fewer than one in 10 high school students took computer science this academic year, according to district data.
That first stat surprises me. My very average suburban high school offered two programming courses way back in 1975 (FORTRAN for beginners, COBOL for the advanced class). Sure, back in the dark ages that meant filling in coding sheets, which were sent to the district office, transcribed onto punch cards, and then run on the district’s mainframe. Turnaround time was about two or three days and then you could start fixing your bugs. Still! It taught us the rudiments of writing code. I’m surprised that 40 years later there’s a high school in the entire country that doesn’t offer a programming class of some kind.
The second stat, however, doesn’t surprise me. Or alarm me. It’s about what I’d expect. Despite some recent hype, computer programming really isn’t the kind of class that everyone needs to take. It’s an advanced elective. I’d guess that no more than 10 percent of all students take physics, or advanced algebra, or art class for that matter. Ten percent doesn’t strike me as a horrible number.