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Comment by Furzel | Hacker News Reader

Quick summary :

The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher.

For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology teachers.

Personal opinion :

While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and squeeze some extra hours ).

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What is it a step forward for? A popular opinion on HN seems to be that programming should be taught in schools because it's somehow a new basic skill everyone should have? I have to disagree and don't see it being a step forward for anything. Programming after hours, taught as a kind of extracurricular activity seems sufficient to me. There's no need to know how to program a computer. Knowing how to use a computer is the important skill. You don't need to know how to rebuild a transmission to drive a car in the same way you don't need to know how to build a web page to know how to input text into form fields and click a submit button. Those who are curious and interested will learn to build the things we use while others will find it more than enough to simply to know how to use the things the rest of us have built.

I, like anyone else here, am super passionate about programming and it thrills me to be able to make a computer do my bidding but my friends and family don't care how the computer works. That's okay. I know a carpenter. I love living in a well built home but don't really care to know how to build one. Knowing how to work a stud finder to hang a painting is enough for me.

Not to mention the common argument that "ubiquitous computing will necessitate that everyone have a high degree of technical literacy" is false. Computers are heading from becoming tools to appliances and circuits. You'll never interact with most of them directly, and when you do, it'll be through an abstracted shell or interface of some sort. The actual internals will be arcane to most, running some form of Contiki, QNX, specifically tailored variant of embedded Linux, or whatnot.

We're already seeing this happen with smartphones and tablets. They offer an ecosystem of applications and network-enabled technologies that are useful to users, but in the end, they're digital handcuffs.

The practical benefits of teaching programming will be outweighed by the sheer incompetence and farcical mess that compromises public education in general. There's no way I, personally, can trust such a system to make anything worthwhile of this.

In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, yet the government want pupils to learn programming ? same old french bullshit.

Instead of letting schools adapt their teaching to local conditions and parameters , someone in an office in Paris is deciding for everybody.

That's at the heart of France problems. When the french government starts trusting its citizens things will change.Today there is too much power in a few hands and a total distrust of institutions.

> In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching,

Define basic teaching.

> a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool,

Reference?

I fail to see how the French kids' ability to write would be hurt by their being introduced to programming. Maybe you think the solution to their not being able to write is to sacrifice all other subjects to focus on writing. Though I doubt the writing is that bad, if it's the case I'd probably axe history before programming.

> a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool

Maybe it's time to simplify the French language. After all, we get along just fine in English without l'imparfait du subjonctif.

In the short run, I agree to say that the formation will be very bad and could turn teenagers out of the code with bad experiences, which is a shame.

However in the long run, with IT being more and more present, and the global pool of users being more and more mature, I think that's a good thing which will open great perspectives to our teenagers.

Moreover the educational program can be adapted with the feedback of the field. We shouldn't spit in the soup, this is a good measure.

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