Remember back in April, when El Chuqueño advocated teaching computer coding in our public schools?
Apparently New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio was reading. According to this story in the New York Times:
[T]he goal is for all students, even those in elementary school and those in the poorest neighborhoods, to have some exposure to computer science, whether building robots or learning to use basic programming languages like Scratch, which was devised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach young children the rudiments of coding.
At least two other American cities have recently made commitments to offering computer science to all their students. Chicago has gone the furthest, pledging to make a yearlong computer science course a high school graduation requirement by 2018, and to offer computer science to at least a quarter of elementary school children by then. The San Francisco Board of Education voted in June to offer it from prekindergarten through high school, and to make it mandatory through eighth grade.
Our city officials don’t seem to realize that economic development is a moving target. We can’t train today for today’s jobs. We need to train for tomorrow’s jobs. And though the future is notoriously hard to predict, computer science will be a basic job skill applicable to a range of industries.
I know that we’re nostalgic for El Paso’s Golden Age, when people rode trolleys and baseball was America’s pastime. But it’s time to either step up or get left behind. Again.