Computer Science Should be Required in High School

Unfinished

My wife brought home a high school curriculum filled with the usual courses: English, Pre-Calculus, History, Foreign Language, Biology, Chemistry, etc. Then there are the electives like Anatomy, Statistics, and everyone's favorite, computer science. A computer science class is typically an half or full year elective taken by a small percentage of the student population.

Everyone would agree that our youth today are highly skilled technology consumers. Kids have sufficiently mastered using PCs, smart phones, video games, Google and Facebook. The problem is our children and overall population have no idea how it all works under the hood. Why?

High Schools are offering more computer science electives and encouraging students to take part, but they are not doing enough. It is time for computer science becomes are high school requirement. We have high school students who take four solid years of a foreign language, but haven't been exposed to a programming language.

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics continues to warn of the explosion of computing careers in the coming years. Despite this and the enormous growth of technology in our daily lives, the number of computer science graduates have actually declined in the past decade. See CRA Report.

Fundamentals

Students don't have to learn the latest and greatest technologies. I am not suggesting we turn high schools into vocational schools, but we should require students to be exposed to classic computer science fundamentals. Every high school graduated should have understand the terms algorithm, variable, if-then statement, and loop.

Gender Gap

We know girls are equal to boys in. How will girls know if they would like or be good and programming if they are never exposed to it?

Finite Time

The hard part is deciding what classes to remove or reduce. For me, I would lean towards reducing foreign language learning and humanities in favor of more computer science. I am not saying drop creative writing. Writing papers is a terrific exercise for the brain and hones one's skills in problem solving and thought expression.

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