increasing our human capital

I recently had an idea that I'm really interested in hearing some opinions on; so for the first time it's prompting me to write to some of my favorite bloggers and get their input (hopefully). I'll add any responses to the post.

First letter out to Freakonomics guys:

programming as foreign language
1 message

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Adam Winski	Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 1:05 PM
To: levittdubner@freakonomics.com
Steven and Stephen, I enjoyed your book a great deal and have been a regular reader of your blog for over a year now. It's definitely one of my favorites. I love the both of your perspectives on the world and really appreciate the quality of your guest contributors and question takers. The reason I'm writing to y'all is recently, as I was reading What the Doormouse Said by John Markoff, I was struck as to how similar learning a computer language appeared to be to learning a foreign language. I do not know what kinds of computer classes are being taught in the elementary, middle and high schools in the US so the following may be moot but; what if schools were to offer as an option the opportunity for students to elect programming classes as an alternative to foreign language? I do think that learning languages is important and learning about other cultures is crucial. However, in a world of limited (and seemingly ever moreso) resources, I think it could make a great deal of sense to teach a pragmatic skill over one that is less so. This is especially true when, in my experience, a nontrivial percentage of people do not take learning a foreign language in school very seriously. I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Thanks so much again for all of the great work and effort that y'all put into your blog. Best, Adam Winski Update 1/28: Sent to Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) Update 1/29: Response from Tyler! On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Tyler Cowen wrote: I am all for this and note there have been a few good articles lately about "R"... Tyler Not sure what he means by "R"? but I asked him to please send the articles to which he's referring...hoping to be able to deduce from there. update 2/24/09 - just came across this: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/02/teach-kids-programming-mr-president.html and sent it over to Freakonomics guys as well as a letter to Cuban. update 2/25/09 - one more thing I forgot to mention in the initial post is that I think that this should first be instituted in the lowest performing schools. I can see the argument that those would be the kids who would get the least out of it but I believe the opposite. Teaching underprivileged kids such a useable skill could go a long way towards the employment opportunities those children have, even without the benefit of a degree.