The shortsightedness of commoditizing the mind.

I live in Silicon Valley now.  I miss the east coast, and specifically New York.  But certain things seem sharper here.

"Everyone should learn to code!"

The United States government is planning to invest four billion dollars in teaching American students to learn to code.

Obviously, a lot of smart people are convinced that computer science is the way of the future and that it's becoming a necessary skill to generally be a competent adult.  Which is to say, get a job.

There's a problem with this, however.  Well actually, there's a lot of problems.  The first is that to teach someone computer science and coding, you need to choose a language to teach them.  And that language is either a) written for the express purpose of teaching someone to code, which will turn out lots of people who know that specific language but not much else or b) trendy at the moment you are teaching them, but will go out of fashion in a few years.

The underlying problem here is treating education as if it is job training.  Neither of the products of a) or b) above will be able to "hit the ground running" when hired for a job, which is more or less the stated goal of teaching people computer science in the first place.  The education system in this country, public school up to university, is treating students, that is human minds, as if they are commodities to be pumped out the door into corporations.  And those corporations are and have been complaining that this system is producing substandard products.

I am and have been, as you might guess, a liberal arts student.  But I can code.  And I wasn't a bad coder.  I can't get a job coding because I haven't done it since 2007, so I appear as if I am out of fashion.  The thing is, because I'm a liberal arts student, I know how to think.  And computer science requires a shitload of good logic.  Philosophy teaches logic.  Give me a book and a week and I can learn a programming language (I can say this because that's precisely how I learned Python).  I can do this because I've studied philosophy and logic and languages and all programming languages do basically the same thing, you just need to learn the specifics of how that particular language handles it.  It's even easier than learning human languages (Ancient Semitic languages, for example, don't have verb tenses.  There is no past or future.  It makes translating... fun).  But I can also do lots of other things besides code.

And this is the problem.  Four billion dollars would be a lot better spent teaching people logic and philosophy and then tacking a basic comp sci course at the end.  But people want instant results and when a human being is just another commodity, it's a lot easier not to worry about the future of that human being.