Ego or learning?

I sent this article (“I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You.”) to Jan, who graduated from LUC a few years ago and taught coding to some of our students as part of a start-up idea.

I thought his reply was interesting, and Jan agreed I could share it:

“This came up during the class. Very soon those who were not intrinsically motivated started lazing off. It’s better to have a small group of people who really are fascinated with the world. However I still think it’s worth teaching.
I don’t think this is much different from other subjects that you’d teach at a university. In every class there are really just a few who learn, the others will just memorize or pass to get by.
If you want to be a scholar you really have to want your research or paper to “work”. If you don’t, you are just putting words on paper, maybe to cash a check, get a diploma or boost your ego. A lot of people write papers but very few of those papers would “work” if they were held to the same mathematical standard as code is.
So, in my opinion the difference between coding and “social sciences” is that the former must make sense before it can be published, used or referenced while the latter, more often than not, doesn’t.
Ego forces you to take a position on a subject before you really know much about it. Maybe that is why this guy feels it’s futile to teach today’s kids to code? Because they have been taught to learn just to get by, not to discover, improve or inquire? Often times real discovery requires being wrong and that comes at the expense of one’s ego. In class people were afraid to ask question about coding, which nobody knew anything about. Why?? If you have a big ego, can you show your buggy, horrible beginner code to the class? How does that compare to a well-worded essay with big concepts and great writing that makes no academic sense? I know I have seen a lot of those at LUC, hell I have written them myself. Never really got bad grades for those…
I know this is a bit (lot) off topic but this has got me thinking. The egos are only getting bigger and bigger. That, in my opinion, is the problem with college activism, political, environmental or otherwise. It forces you to take a position on a subject before you really know much about it. Later you are likely to investigate or choose a major in that area. If your real research or readings show or suggest you might be wrong, you can choose between betraying your activist community or your academic purpose. For 20 year olds, this is often not even a choice, especially if they are at university because their parents always told them they had to and not because they really wanted to become an expert at a field. I think anyone of any age with a reputation as a socialist, environmentalist, feminist, right-winger — you name it — is put in a very tough spot in the current environment.”

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Author: David Zetland

I'm a political-economist from California who now lives in Amsterdam.

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