Not everyone is cut out to be a NASA astronaut space scientist engineering tech-guru UNIX kernel programming god. 1. There exists genetic limitations, and 2. Not everyone has an asperger-style of thinking. It should be no surprise to HN that your average human relates closer to the arts, music and perhaps sports than machine binary code.
That's what we should be providing them with free college for.
I should have said, few are capable of learning a new language without total immersion. And few are capable of learning to do linear algebra, calculus, or C++ well. Even fewer are capable of serious critical thinking.
But they can still mostly benefit from college.
We as a society push everyone in every possible field towards college. Many of these could be apprenticeships, etc. There's no reason to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn a lot of this stuff.
Even if we went back 40 years to when college was (compared to now) fairly cheap, a lot of fields wouldn't make sense in that environment.
You don't need asperger-style thinking to be able to code, nor do I think the skills you need to code are particularly rare. What's rarer is the inclination to learn.
In my opinion, anyone that can write out a cooking recipe can learn to code. Cooking recipes are basically imperative programming in disguise. The ingredients are the variables, and the cooking instructions are the algorithms.
> isn't art a product of creativity - an attribute that cannot be taught?
Background: I went to art school. Why would creativity be something that's unteachable? It's a mode of thinking, just like any other. Every talent needs to be practiced, trained, enhanced; people need their ideas challenged, and a safe space to develop. I see little difference in this respect between art and engineering.
Saying that creativity is just an innate property of, "artistic" people is discounting the work involved in the development of someone that is creating the things you are taking for granted.