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Comment by schnitzelstoat | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me of the 'IT Literacy' classes we had when I was in high school where they just taught us to use Microsoft Office products.

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A lot of those were definitely sponsored by MS and co as well, but at least you did learn a practical, transferable, morph-able skill. You'll come out of that with experience using the features and structures of a general purpose OS, as well as the workflow of mode-base production software (in some cases). Excel at least is also just such a powerful 'everything' tool that I'm not even that mad about it.

'AI Literacy' is just very much not that at all and is just state-mandated brain rot.

I was started on learning how to make PowerPoint presentations and present them in kindergarten, and I'm incredibly thankful for that. More broadly, building a slide deck is a critical part of public speaking and presenting and helps kids out a lot.

In third grade I got taught how to type properly and hit 60-70 WPM, which is roughly where I still type to this day when doing tasks that require thinking instead of just doing a pre-compiled speed benchmark.

Kids really need to learn the fundamentals of things, but on the other hand some of the same arguments came out when calculators were going mainstream and classes just evolved to take the new tools into account. I think eventually we'll see the same thing happen with AI, but I'm not sure what that will look like for every case yet. Probably more paper and pencil work tbh

I hate the calculator argument. Kids still need to learn how to do basic arithmetic by hand. There's a reason that CAS calculators are banned on standardized tests. Even in college, I had classes where profs would force us to do complex calculus by hand even though Mathematica could spit out the answer. Understanding things from first principles is important, and probably even more so with AI!

We had the same requirement at my high school in Sacramento back in the early 2000s. I was given the option to test out of it, since I already knew how to use Office, which I had been using at home since fifth grade for reports and presentations. I had to study harder for Excel and Access, since most high school students don’t need sophisticated spreadsheets or databases, but I passed the exam on my first attempt.

A far better computer literacy course was the one I took at Sacramento City College as a dual-enrollment student in summer 2004, which was the prerequisite to programming courses. Even though I already knew how to program in QBASIC, Visual Basic 6 and C++, I still had to take this course. Anyway, we learned very basic computer architecture (the roles of the CPU, memory, storage, buses, etc.), the role of the operating system and the difference between it and applications, computer networking, the Web (with an introduction to HTML and CSS), the history of computing, and a brief introduction to programming, with exercises in C++ and even Scheme (the professor showed us his copy of SICP and threatened students who talked during his lectures with Scheme homework assignments).

It was a fun class. The professor knew I was a Linux fan, but I had a hard time downloading a distro at home due to my having dial-up. He gave me some FreeBSD install CDs. I became a fan of FreeBSD since, and exploring FreeBSD led me down a rabbit hole where I devoured the history of Unix and BSD. By the time I graduated from high school, I wanted to be a systems software researcher like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. This shaped my early career; I’ll never forget meeting Marshall Kirk McKusick my senior year of college at USENIX FAST 2009.

Turned out that computer literacy course I was required to take at Sacramento City College despite having computer literacy had far-reaching impacts in my life.

One of the bright lights of that class was knowing how to bring up the "Flight Sim" easter egg in Excel.

Any sort of "X Literacy" raises red flags for me. Actual _literacy_ - as in, being able to critically read and comprehend stuff of sufficient complexity - is basically a superpower that makes learning all these other skills possible, and it seems to be in terribly short supply.

I had the same experience in the UK around 2005 to 2011, I wonder if it's the same everywhere?

I feel that my experience was far worse and bordering on the absurd and bureaucratic. We spent years following instructions, taking screenshots of us opening specific windows and dialogs in Office etc, saving all these screenshots into a Word document, and then printing the document.

To be clear, it was every single action you took. Moved the mouse to "Insert"? Don't click it yet, take a screenshot of your mouse on the "Insert" button, and then click it, and take a screenshot of the menu that opened. Then, take more screenshots of moving your mouse to buttons and lists in dialogs that opened. Then, take a screenshot of the document with the thing you just inserted.

Now, write several paragraphs in detail about what you just did. Print everything, and that includes both the document you just created for the exercise and then the document writing about the document creating exercise with all it's dozens of screenshots.

Each individual printed piece of paper needed to be kept in a plastic wallet, which was then kept in document folder. In the end we had multiple of these document folders that were without a doubt a complete waste of paper and time.

The argument was that it was needed in case the exam board decided it needed to double check the teachers scores, which I think never happened once anyway. There was never once a reason given for why each individual piece of paper needed to be put in a plastic wallet.

This was during a period of time where CS education at schools had essentially totally vanished from the curriculum for decades, it was added back after I'd finished school.

Words cannot describe how much I despised the entire ordeal. There simply are not enough words to describe the total absurdity of an IT class requiring screenshots of clicking buttons and being printed onto paper.

While the teacher was trying to explain how to add PowerPoint transitions I was writing scripts that would fetch currency conversions and graph them because I was that bored. One time I write some terrible "chat" system via some type of free shared HTML/PHP hosting and meta tag based auto refreshing of the chat history for a few class friends to talk across the room.

And yet that generation knows how to use computers, and the current generation doesn’t

Fellow former British schoolkid here. One part that really sticks in my memory about "IT" class was when they were preparing us for an exam that asked "which of these are functions of an image editor" and we had to memorize that, I think "fill tool" was, "pen tool" wasn't, "adjust brightness" was, and so on, without reason or reference to reality. There was just a list and you had to know it.

I imagine these people were delighted when a Big Computer Company offered to step in and design a curriculum for them.

Yeah, my experience was from the UK between like 2002 and 2007.

Speaking with my younger cousins it seems nowadays they have the opportunity to learn actual programming and so on.

We just got Doom (the 1995 one) and Street Fighter 2 to work via LAN and played that during the class, one person would do the actual work each lesson so we still had something to hand in.

Getting the LAN to work wasn't easy so I suppose it taught me that!

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing

Logo, MS Office, Counter-Strike 1.0-1.6, PHP, War§ow, Quake, ..

01010101 0123456789ABCDEF AND OR XOR, ..

It sounds like you actually learned something in your class, though?

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