>Teaching and computers don't mix. Certainly not before eighth grade.
I believe this is categorically and catastrophically wrong.
I have led a very privileged life. I'm 45 and I was exposed to computer programming when I was in third grade. That's 1983. With old Atari computers. It was basically 10 print "Jonathan is great" 20 GOTO 10 But already we had an understanding of job flow and loops. By 5th grade I was playing Robot Odyssey. At the time I never took it seriously; there's only so much you can do with BASIC but myself and my friends already "got" how computers worked by the age of 8.
I can't tell you how much of an advantage I have over not only my peers but even people younger than I am. Those precious few moments I spent in the computer lab hacking (yes, hacking. I figured out how to change the color of the background/border and the main screen, figured out how the color codes were expressed and learned how to generate random numbers, and wrote a program that would probably induce a seizure in some epileptics) resulted in me having a fundamental understanding of not only how computers work, but how to hack.
Trust me, 8, even 6 & 7 year olds can learn how to program computers. Even if it's LOGO/Turtle Graphics. You can gamify problem solving and instill in young kids a fundamental understanding of things that will serve them for their entire professional career.
Thanks for bringing this up because I have struggled to understand why I seem to have such an advantage over my peers when it comes to working on computers and I just realized why. None of my peers were "programming" before high school. To me "hacking" comes naturally because I first learned it at such a young age.
I wouldn't worry so much about the future of our country if every 3rd grader got the EXACT same exposure and opportunity to play with programming and computers that I did. Granted, not all kids are going to take to it like I did, but the point is to expose every young American school kid to these activities so that if and when they choose to become software devs or machine learning engineers or even just spreadsheet jockeys, they get logic, programming, and computers on a fundamental level.