With the way that foreign languages are taught in American schools (rote learning, treated like any other subject, lack of practical application), it is not really a loss to learn the ongoing process of how to be a creator v. a consumer with the ugly magic of coding.<p>That being said, moving from AP CS to a more structured, less-niche curriculum has its own fundamental challenges.<p>> “The types of learning that schools were set up for isn’t going to continue to prepare students for the world they’re entering. Knowledge is not the commodity—the commodity is being able to take these various parts of a problem and put them together in a new creative way,” Steele says.<p>From <a href="http://qz.com/608355/education-in-america-is-on-the-cusp-of-a-dramatic-change-will-the-country-let-it-happen/" rel="nofollow">http://qz.com/608355/education-in-america-is-on-the-cusp-of-...</a>
Learn Spanish - Spanish will be spoken the rest of your life, whether you go into that "field" or not.<p>Learn Java - will eventually drop off the Tiobe list, whether you go into that field or not.<p>Learning to code should be an alternative to a technical class, not a humanities class.
> States consider allowing kids to learn<p>I suppose corporate demand for coding skills has reached the point where it's time for the benevolent overlords of the state to forcefully "allow" the public to subsidize those inputs.
This seems ridiculous to me. We don't speak to people the same way we express computation to machines. This totally undersells the cognitive benefits of speaking more than one language.