Biden to Coal Miners: Learn to Code
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
If you, personally, are having trouble with employment (or anything, really), then you, personally, with the support of those around you, should do something about it. Realistically your only other option is sitting around waiting for a magic fairy to fix your life, and it just doesn't work that way.
But on a societal level, if the employment landscape is changing rapidly it's easy for whole groups to go under in a short period of time.
That uncomfortable truth doesn't change the fact that for any individual the best course of action is likely going to be improving themselves rather than hoping the entire world changes around them instead.
20 years on, my hometown is still poor, and I'm not. In another 20 years, the situation is likely to remain the same.
Is it insensitive to point that out? I'm not sure. If you'd asked the younger me, I'd tell you that 'sensitivity' was a thing that rich people worry about. The poor are trying to make ends meet, they couldn't give a fuck about ivory tower waffle.
Perhaps you try your best and it doesn't work out anyway. Life can be a cruel mistress.
When an individual says to another individual, personally, "you know, coal mining is dead - you should learn to code" - then that is nothing but a helpful suggestion; it's not insensitive or rude. Whatever social problems led to that situation are not your concern, or theirs.
It is supposed to be the concern of a politician, however. When a politician 'advises' an entire class of people that way, it implies that they view the problem that affects that entire class as fundamentally not their responsibility to solve. As a person (aspiring to be) in charge, you need to take responsibility for social problems, and that means providing class-based solutions to class-based problems. Suggest individual action as a solution is effectively victim-blaming. An acceptable thing for Biden to have said would be to have mooted the idea of government subsidized retraining initiatives.
Other examples include: women need to wear less slutty clothing to avoid rape; poor people need to work harder; racial minorities should avoid mostly-white areas to avoid abuse; etc....
I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head here, however it's not unacceptable to everyone, just a particular group of people (I don't know much about US politics but certainly in Europe that'd be a standard left/right split).
A lot of people just don't see that as being the role of government.
They might, in a reduced form, roughly subscribe to the idea of welfare as an insurance policy (against crime at a low level, and uprising at the more extreme end of the spectrum), but not as some sort of moral imperative.
According to the College Board, the PSAT Reading+Math test scores needed to have a 50% chance of scoring 3 or higher on the AP Computer Science A exam is 1130, and 1280 to score 4 or higher https://cb.collegeboard.org/ap-potential/app/expectancy.html... . PSAT Reading+Math test scores are comparable to SAT scores, and the average SAT score is 1060, even though SAT takers are a self-selected group. The average SAT score in West Virginia, where there are many coal miners, is 974.
Tone deaf. Just tone deaf.
How many countries have successfully transformed massive adult labors to programmers? I'd like to know.
Gingrich proposed tweaking child labor laws to let poor students work as janitors to make the schools look close to as shiny as rich schools ( https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/newt-gi... ), but I think that is missing the real problem.
Furthermore, funding doesn’t seem to be the problem with US schools, see [2].
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cma.asp
[2] https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm
Biden said learn to code, not learn to do advanced placement computer science.
(I still think is advice is unfortunately going to be impractical for many members of this particular group of people.)
I.e. if you do well, you can skip the Java intro class?
I don't know. So what if it does?
The advice was to learn to code, not learn to be a computer scientist. You don't need degree-level computer science in order to get a job coding.
To me, "learn to code" = Took the "Intro to Java" class (certified by passing the AP CS exam)
Whereas "CS Degree" = 15+ classes in CS, math, stats.
Advance Placement is not very "advanced". Passing AP CS simply means you learned basic Java in high school, so can skip it in college.
But is your point that there are still job opportunities for those with very basic coding skills? CS apprentice? That would be interesting.