Regulatory capture is a common hazard to rule-making, where rules that are designed for everyone become corrupted or changed in a way that puts the interests of some over the interests of the broader good.
A perfect example of a rule that benefits everyone is the example of pooping and drinking -- you want to poop one place, but drink from a different place. Short of everyone having space-station grade recyclers, this rule allows people to drink water that is relatively safe rather than infected with all kinds of disease-causing organisms. While this rule still applies today, there are similar modern equivalents involving industrial and chemical waste that are not always followed as much as they should be.
Where groups of people are involved, such a simple rule quickly leads to working out which places are designated for pooping and which are for drinking. If a committee or other authority is assigned the task of deciding where these activities are to take place, there are many opportunities for the assignment to favour some people over others.
When making rules or designing pretty much anything, corruption is a factor in assigning better conditions to some people (or purposes) than others, but corruption is not a requirement. All it takes to favour one group (or one purpose) over another is specialisation, paired with forgetting or neglecting to serve another group or purpose.
It's alright that not every thing or every design works for every purpose, but sometimes the result is that a purpose once well-served becomes increasingly neglected. When this isn't just a matter of scale (buggy whip production has gone down over the years, but only as a function of the number of buggies still in operation) it can have negative effects. Some negative effects are unintended, but all negative effects are (by definition) negative.
"Obviously this varies and exaggerates a little, but students too often leave school demonstrating persistent, low-level trauma and a general fear (at least strong aversion) to entire subjects that school "ruined" for them."Contemporary education at least, is of poor design with notoriously poor results. The easiest way to sugarcoat this is to find some statistical way to show that things have at least improved, but this says nothing about how far we have to go or why things work as poorly as they do.
Throughout the world in general, the most common approach to education is to have fierce competition where often very little is needed, and to insist on perfection where the ideal is arbitrary, inaccurate, out of date or on a whim:
"Why did I fail the quiz? It asked what the largest city in Turkey is and I said Istanbul!"
"Because that's wrong, the book says Constantinople."
"But it's not even called that anymore -- my family came here from Istanbul!"
"The quiz is on what the book says. Go sit down."
While there's nothing wrong with striving for perfection as a long-term goal, it's a miserable and unrewarding place to begin the learning of any subject! Certainly you don't want doctors or rocket scientists to go into surgery or engine design with the basic attitude of "Well, nothing's perfect, is it?" but then engineers have a far more realistic concept of fault tolerance than schools do.
The broad educational approach is too often more like:
"School can suck the enjoyment out of any kind of learning. It doesn't actually have to, it's simply designed that way."1. Attempt to teach student
2. Test student
3. In the event of failure, discard student and try teaching a different one
Obviously this varies and exaggerates a little, but students too often leave school demonstrating persistent, low-level trauma and a general fear (at least strong aversion) to entire subjects that school "ruined" for them.
To use myself as an example, I had no trouble reading as a child -- I was able to read before I began school, I sometimes read far enough ahead of the class that I was sent to a higher-grade only for reading. Reading wasn't a problem, and yet (not when I was in a higher-grade class, just to be clear) some of the exercises that were tangential to reading were so thoroughly unpleasant that I lost my ability to enjoy fiction for nearly the entire time I was in school.
After graduation, I slowly began enjoying fiction again. But I enjoyed it before it was required, and school nearly killed that for me. School can suck the enjoyment out of any kind of learning. It doesn't actually have to, it's simply designed that way.
The sad thing is that people are natural learners -- learning is a basic function of the brain itself, and some of the approaches we can trace all the way back to Confucius (who was neither the worst teacher of all time, nor the best possible teacher for every subject) do more to get in the way of education than they do to assist.
Of course many people suspect education is broken, and offer various solutions.
Some start with the idea of refuting "one-size-fits-all" so literally that they believe everyone needs a completely individual "bespoke" approach. While one-size-fits-all does fit poorly, we don't need to spend a great deal of time trying to fit nine extra sleeves or triangular footwear -- we can probably come up with a very small number of approaches that can be tweaked in small ways to fit well.
"Nobody needs to go to Microsoft school to learn Microsoft-only tools that are only useful to Microsoft (and basically turn teachers into salespeople) but both Microsoft and Apple have had this conflict of interest with education since the 1980s at the latest -- not all of which (only most of it) is terrible."Most "education reform" is industry propaganda designed to co-opt education for state-subsidised training for the corporate workplace, which naturally enrages anyone who is serious about education. Sadly if you're working with Microsoft, you're probably helping to fund this corporate takeover and co-opting of public schools. The goal there is to replace general-purpose education, just as much as they want to replace general-purpose computing.
Nobody needs to go to Microsoft school to learn Microsoft-only tools that are only useful to Microsoft (and basically turn teachers into salespeople) but both Microsoft and Apple have had this conflict of interest with education since the 1980s at the latest -- not all of which (only most of it) is terrible. Apple computers are after all, computers too, and you can still learn general-purpose computing on them IF that's what people are really teaching. (And if the computer design itself still allows it...)
Sadly, we continue to erode the concept of general-purpose education and move towards training future customers, and replacing broader conceptual learning with increasingly vendor-specific education. In many ways the schools have already been taken over.
But even as the goals are corrupted, what hasn't changed is the overall approach. It's easier, more enjoyable, and less trauma-inducing to explore knowledge and build it up than to put constant emphasis on a ruler while bellowing "Not tall enough! Not tall enough!" as if doing so will cause people to grow that much faster. Learning is growth, and knowledge increases just as naturally as height. We can help people love education, or we can continue to make people hate and fear learning itself.
Computers had already gained a reputation for being unforgiving and requiring precision before most people were required to work with them. Tell someone with no first-hand experience that JUST ONE missing or out-of-place semicolon can prevent an entire program from working, and many will imagine a world where computing (at least coding) is a next-to-impossible task.
What they WON'T think (but we could have taught) is that "It's cake to find the place where the semicolon is missing or misplaced, and then fix it -- often with a single keypress." Instead we let them develop the notion that the task is virtually impossible, before they even get started.
It's incredibly sad to constantly watch education undermine itself and teach destructively, rather than instructively. While education is supposed to help learners build up knowledge, evaluation -- and even teaching style -- continues to kick over sand castles. Of course people learn that the real point of education is NOT learning -- just career fodder or a means of finally escaping the classroom, because that's what we actually teach. Then when they have escaped, learning so many things is just a painful feeling they never want to revisit. And this is a public service?
"Rules and facts are not useless, but if we stop challenging and questioning them then we stop progressing as a society."The solution isn't to pretend that every answer is right, or to toss away the idea that some answers are in fact better than others -- it would be self-contradicting, for one (every answer is fine; except the way we teach, of course!)
Up isn't down, right isn't left, black isn't white -- it's actually very useful to know things the way they are. However, the people who have greatly advanced not only society but science and technology are people who are not overly focused on what's not possible, or what's wrong -- but people who are able to (as Einstein put it) turn the ruled paper sideways, so the lines don't get in the way. Rules and facts are not useless, but if we stop challenging and questioning them then we stop progressing as a society. And still the way we teach rewards people for generally not questioning things.
Outside of stereotypically "creative" tasks such as art and music (and often tragically even during those classes as well) we don't teach people to have imagination or to utilise it as a learning tool -- we teach people to put that away and think like a book, not like a mind.
But people aren't book-machines, they aren't pen and paper; they are creatures capable of thought and feeling, which most instruction does little to utilise. Still, most education is made for books, for pen and paper but not for people.
Computers, we are taught -- are rigid, precise, mechanistic and mathematical metal and plastic beasts which we can tame only by donning a mantle of rigid, precise, mechanistic or deterministic thinking. There is no room for trial and error, and this is certainly no place for creativity! To operate the machine, one must CONFORM to the specification.
This is ultimately mythology, as it was when this monstrous rigidity was applied to all other subjects. But computers seem to offer the perfect vindication for the sort of rigid, unimaginative lesson-drilling that schools are the frequent purveyors of, even when a few teachers hope to transcend the relentless bore of the system that employs them.
What better proof of "sit up straight, eyes on the board, repeat after me" than a computer, after all? And yet poor Albert, bless him, he can't even turn his paper the right way. What a shame!
Teaching would be far more effective and efficient if we actually assisted people in learning how to think -- not the "one right way" of thinking, any more than the "one correct genre of music" or the "one correct style of painting", but certainly how to think.
And while we are hopefully teaching people to make greater use of their minds, we are busy countering that with teaching them to accept information unquestioningly and that regurgitating bits of data is more valuable than thought. There is the true shame, and the results are all around us.
What's more, those misaligned efforts ultimately produce more teachers who "teach" that way than those who don't, and along comes a bunch of experts to "transform education" by slapping a veneer of flexibility onto a system optimised for producing intellectual cogs and levers -- but not enriching minds unless it happens incidentally and appropriately, so as not to disrupt the other "learning" going on.
Similarly, we are meant to instruct students in coding so that they can control their devices (rather than be controlled by them) and all the while we are teaching them to simply accept rote and regurgitated data as if it were written in stone by the finger of God. Aren't we saddling them all with mixed messages, at best?
"...we don't teach people to have imagination or to utilise it as a learning tool -- we teach people to put that away and think like a book, not like a mind."After all that, really, what are students supposed to think?
We have these machines that most teachers don't understand, and we have to drill into students the idea that if you conform perfectly to the machine's design it will do some desired thing. The only thing you can't do is break out of this conformity. It's not optional -- you must think and work just as rigidly as bits and octets, as that's all it can understand.
This has been repeated without question for decades, and the real tragedy is we used to do so much better. Sure, we also taught that the computer is rigid and unforgiving -- but moments later, we demonstrated the exact opposite. With coding, you can turn the ruled paper sideways.
But first you have to excel at maths.
Actually that isn't true either, since the 1950s people (including professors of mathematics like Grace Hopper, who knew a few things about computers herself, having invented some programming languages that are still in use 60 years later) have worked very hard so that you do NOT have to be be good at maths to code. I'm not good at maths -- I'm absolutely terrible. I did terribly with virtually all things numeric in school. I just barely got by, while my peers managed exceptionally well by comparison. Even today I remain abysmal in the subject.
The reason people (wrongly) assume that being good at computers requires an aptitude for maths (an aptitude I clearly and demonstrably lack) is that computers are mathematical. Everything they actually do is numeric.
But by that argument, you must also excel at maths to play the violin -- music is incredibly rich with numeric information both in theory and practice. Do you want to write a sonata for the flute? You're just going to have to learn inverse Fourier transforms! If you want me to explain them, I'll need to go to the Wikipedia article and pretend that I get what it says. I confess that I don't know the flute either, so it's entirely possible that the cause is I never learned inverse Fourier transforms.
Computers still use principles of the Jacquard loom, so of course if you want to design ugly jumper patterns then you must first learn calculus and honours level physics. It isn't true, but we can make the argument just the same.
When we are done arguing, someone can say that applications have made this possible -- no, you don't need to learn to code to create a jumper pattern, but you also don't need to be good at advanced maths to learn to code -- because programming languages themselves have that much in common with the applications that save us from the "need" to code.
"People didn't need to attend years at university to learn coding then, it didn't require a computer science degree or a special aptitude -- only a bit of interest and a bit of time, as would learning any sort of new subject."And how many schools are teaching that? No, you have so many schools regurgitating things that were really literally true in 1952 that they've forgotten to check or question the accuracy of their own teaching for the past seven decades of instruction. It's what we've always said, so it must be Constantinople, NOT Istanbul! Why not just teach people that to code you'll need a keypunch, or paper tape?
We ultimately teach both students and their teachers that coding requires skills it doesn't require, that they must follow rules are not by any means unbreakable laws, and that there are no alternatives to this -- all of which are false. But we teach these falsehoods if only by omission, and they are what most people (who would only know better through better education or hands-on learning) including many teachers believe.
To do far better than this, education would not even need to learn from its mistakes; it would only need to learn from its successes. The problem is that this is an area where education rarely learns at all.
If it simply learned from its successes it would have several options, both from the past and the present. It would be able to look at basic literacy in the present, and discover that when people suffer while learning to read (due to either a natural disability such as dyslexia, or due to an incredible lack of exposure to education previously) there are many different approaches that can be applied to save an individual from illiteracy.
Do we do that for computer education, including coding? Quite rarely.
Even if we chose to ignore the present and what lessons we could take from literacy reform, we could still look to the past for guidance -- for things we did that worked quite well, but that we abandoned foolishly on a whim.
There was a period when personal computers were very new, when coding was a key feature of the system anyone purchased. People didn't need to attend years at university to learn coding then, it didn't require a computer science degree or a special aptitude -- only a bit of interest and a bit of time, as would learning any sort of new subject.
Wouldn't it be nice if more instructors were aware of that? They might even become more comfortable with the subject themselves, before projecting their fears and feelings of inadequacy and helplessness about technology onto their students.
In fact you can go on YouTube and watch old programmes such as TVOntario's "Bits and Bytes" from 1983, or the BBC's The Computer Programme from '82, or "Making the Most of the Micro" also from 1983. The latter was part of the "BBC's Computer Literacy Project" -- please let that sink in: "Computer Literacy Project". It was acceptable to say this was a matter of literacy in 1983. Try that now, and you risk insulting most users (as well as teachers).
"We are teaching more that is destructive and misleading than we are teaching what is helpful and correct."What happened of course is that sometime around the 1990s, we gave up on the idea of teaching computing to make way for application training. Forget understanding your computer! Just purchase this word processor or video game and learn applications instead! Along with this new mythology of false implications like you need a PhD from Oxford to write a Hello World program (or at least, anything worth learning) there is the false dichotomy of being able to code versus purchasing or downloading applications.
We are teaching more that is destructive and misleading than we are teaching what is helpful and correct. We give them a very limiting mythology, which some would argue is bad enough -- then we give them no tools or information to question, test or challenge that mythology. And a big part of the reason we do that is we don't give anything better to the instructors themselves. If they don't know any better than this, they won't teach any better than this.
So even if we don't have our students going back to when computing was actually taught before university, we could still take our educators back far enough to see where the rest of it went wrong -- a history lesson for teachers and administrators, just so they know what is actually possible.
They won't need to listen to the inexplicable ramblings of Steve Wozniak, who now tells people that before age 11 students are incapable of the logic needed to write code, when we can simply watch Episode 6 of Bits and Bytes where (ordinary, standard-issue) 7-year-olds are learning to write code -- on a machine that Wozniak himself helped design!
We can go back as far as 1953, when Grace Hopper was proposing that English be used to write code instead of symbols. Not that you'd really want to code in something that follows this rule as rigidly as COBOL did, but in 1957, prior to (and contributing to) the completed design of COBOL itself, IBM's FORTRAN had a brother called COMTRAN, which looked like this:
"01009 START. OPEN ALL FILES."
"01012 COMPARE.EMPLOYEE.NUMBERS. GO TO COMPUTE.PAY WHEN DETAIL EMPLOYNO 01013 IS EQUAL TO MASTER EMPLOYNO, LOW.DETAIL WHEN DETAIL 01014 EMPLOYNO IS LESS THAN MASTER EMPLOYNO."
"ALGO was inspired by ALGOL 58, which heavily inspired BASIC in 1964 and (to a certain debatable degree) Python in 1991."So why don't we do that? For one, we already have. There are many ways we could continue to improve on existing designs (and I regularly advocate doing so) but as with all designs, there have been many dead ends along the way. The biggest problem with code like "COMPARE.EMPLOYEE.NUMBERS. GO TO COMPUTE.PAY WHEN DETAIL EMPLOYNO" (apart from the all caps -- note that this code dates from an era where telegrams were still sent in ALL CAPS and decades later, early Apples did not all feature lowercase characters) is that all-English coding can be more tedious to learn or use than coding with some (minor) amount of abbreviation or symbols.
Most languages go too far the other way and are too cryptic to be completely ideal for beginners, but since the 1960s it has PROVEN trivial (not a magnificent feat of engineering or design, but closer to common sense) to strike a balance between "code" and "English" that the above-mentioned 7-year-old coders will not struggle with.
We just don't teach that often enough.
At the core of my frustration is the fact that this was a solved problem a few decades ago, which nearly everyone teaches is a practically unsolvable problem today. We could teach coding, a few decades ago, to anybody who could read and write English. Yet somehow today it's impossible. Well, no it isn't. But it has to be grueling and awful -- no, that's just how schools are for some stupid reason.
But only children are capable of learning these new things -- no, there is ample footage of people in their 60s learning what we used to call basic computing skills, which today we would call coding. So nearly everything we teach about this is ultimately a series of erroneous and even disproven assumptions. But we continue to teach them, we keep cementing computer illiteracy and computerphobia into place because we can -- we tell people that applications are okay, but you can channel what's left of your computerphobia into the demon pits lurking beneath the GUI. Once again, this isn't really education -- it's marketing.
And at the core of this mythology is the half-truth that computers are inflexible. Well, they're inflexible until some genius comes along and (through years of study, meditation and of course, a computer science degree or two) manages the absolutely Herculean task of taming the impossible machine into an application that even a poor user can handle.
But there are rules, there are rules! Just as a genie cannot abide that one of your three wishes is for more wishes, the genius of the computer who can make you an application has one absolute and strict limitation -- the one thing they CANNOT do is make a programming language that anybody can learn. That sort of "application" is simply beyond the realm of all possibility, so we no longer try to do it. But we at least save people the trouble of wondering if it's possible -- No, it isn't! Go sit down.
When Hopper wanted English to replace mathematical symbols for writing programs, the application (for her programming language) was business, not computer literacy. Programming languages designed specifically to be broadly accessible as their primary feature did not really enter the picture until the early 1960s.
"So "ease of use" or ease of learning will always strike a pleasant balance between an absurdly flexible and frustratingly rigid design."Before Pascal was designed for programming education in 1970, the most notable efforts towards a language specifically for learning were BASIC and Logo. You absolutely can learn BASIC, possibly even by just watching British or Canadian television from 30 to 40 years ago, but Logo would be even easier. The main drawback with Logo is telling someone that that drawing what looks like Spirograph designs or animating a cat is the same thing as coding -- yet it is. It would of course, take further instruction to prove it.
You can even learn coding skills without a computer, simply by applying slightly different rules to "Simon Says" (a game more universal than many people might realise) and replacing the computer with one or more participants who respond to a specific rule in a specific way.
Yes, computers are very inflexible. What's the first thing that people do with a computer after switching it on?
They load software that is more flexible than the computer was to begin with.
THAT'S the lesson we need to be teaching and demonstrating, not this cargo cult teaching that basic computing is "nearly impossible" to learn. This is what ultimately would better empower users. Of course there's nothing wrong with expert-level coders or expert-level instruction; just that neither are prerequisites to coding (most of them would not exist if it were, Linus Torvalds included -- he was not an expert to begin with).
You can make the computer INCREDIBLY flexible in what it can do and respond to, but the way that's done is through coding. You can even make the task of coding itself incredibly flexible! The only thing is, if you make it TOO flexible it will become unpredictable, and it's actually easier to learn if the computer remains somewhat predictable. So "ease of use" or ease of learning will always strike a pleasant balance between an absurdly flexible and frustratingly rigid design.
We don't need anybody to be afraid of this.
We could just tell people (they wouldn't believe us) that if they find existing programming languages unpleasant, they could simply design their own. The instructions they would need to design such a language are not necessarily more complicated than our new "Simon Says" game, but actually implementing such a language would be SLIGHTLY more complicated. They would probably need assistance.
Slightly, because the way of demonstrating programming language design is demonstrated in an episode of The Computer Programme from 1982, although I first watched it years after I started teaching this sort of thing. In Episode 3, they have the BBC Micro connected to a robot arm; the arm is controlled by a sequence of relatively cryptic (probably numeric) commands that someone has stuffed into BASIC subroutines.
"What passes for instruction is as horrible as this -- and as a result, most people think the subject is even impossible for them."By simple use of single-line IF/THEN commands and an INPUT statement, the "user" (or coder) can now control the robot with simple commands like UP, DOWN, etc. or even quickly add their own commands, as the host of the show does.
He does this without knowing how to write a programming language per se, in all of a few seconds, but it's so important to always remember that computers are very inflexible and require rigid and unforgiving precision!
It might suffice to simply take all the computer teachers in the world and lock them up in a huge warehouse with food and toilets, and not let them out until they've learned how to code. But that would only reinforce the horrible way they already teach.
Instead, we need to show them that far from being an inflexible, rigid and unforgiving interface as far as the user is concerned, that any ORDINARY (standard-issue) human can create their own programming commands, which they can then use to code -- in a language of their own design, if it so pleases them. There is certainly ample opportunity for creativity and imagination there!
But to do that, we need to give educators access to better information, a better story than the tired mythology of things that never work unless you have entered and conformed to a veritable priesthood of ideas and concepts. It isn't so, nor was it since the last 1950s. It isn't Constantinople anymore.
If you don't like the rules of programming languages, we need to impart (better yet demonstrate, hands-on) a certain amount of information that a child can easily manage to learn -- and let these poor souls who were taught lies and half-truths that said certain amount of information will let them do virtually anything they want or imagine.
That's the simple truth, and we have denied it to anyone who hasn't excelled at the very (misleadingly) narrow group of things we insist are "coding" (You MUST do X, you will NEED Y, you cannot avoid Z -- all of which came later on and never were required in the first place) can prove to themselves that most of these "rules" are in fact, options.
It is so pervasive that even those who CAN prove the myth to be a myth do not question it, and carry on in light of all the evidence against it as though it were true.
"To be certain, part of the reason it is like this is because education and industry have different needs -- we have ceased to tend to the needs of education itself, and settled for the needs of industry, which can abide and even thrive on far more ignorance (and misleading information) than a quality education can abide."What passes for instruction is as horrible as this -- and as a result, most people think the subject is even impossible for them. Why wouldn't they? Their instructors never learned any better.
To be certain, part of the reason it is like this is because education and industry have different needs -- we have ceased to tend to the needs of education itself, and settled for the needs of industry, which can abide and even thrive on far more ignorance (and misleading information) than a quality education can abide. This conflict of interest has lead to tweaking education to neglect itself in certain areas. As with regulatory capture, not all of this neglect actually requires corruption -- but corruption is a feature nonetheless.
Coding is not just a skill for a career in computers, anymore than writing is just a skill for people who intend to write books for a living. It is much closer to a realistic understanding of what a computer (or better yet, what the average user) can do. Average, because we are only talking about the skills that roughly anybody can learn, if we bother to teach.
But I mark any quality of education damnable, which would do less harm if we did NOT send someone to school for it, but that we would far better serve them just by sitting them in front of 80s television instead. A school that cannot out-teach a BBC Programme or even approach its accuracy and helpfulness perhaps should not exist. Rather than have you take this to its most literal conclusion, I insist that better education could easily be possible. We simply. Don't. Bother.
"A school that cannot out-teach a BBC Programme or even approach its accuracy and helpfulness perhaps should not exist."We ought to teach computer literacy to students, so that computers work for them, and not the other way around. But we will continue to fail, until we can first help their teachers. As we fail, we ultimately teach most people to let computers control them -- this bodes extremely poorly for society and the future. Please, let's stop conditioning people to feel and then act helpless. Let's stop making this more difficult or "impossible" than it really is. It does help Microsoft, that's true -- though it does great harm to everyone else.
We also need to better understand this general trauma that education creates, because although the efforts to combat it will ultimately need to be run through some sort of quality control (at least peer review) by some sort of experts, the only people who can ultimately prevent the trauma caused by the educational system are the people who run the educational system.
Excellent tutoring (created by giving to tutors what we cannot give to other educators, perhaps) can take the edge off (but not prevent) some of the trauma caused by the generally abysmal quality of education -- at least softening the blow. It would be very nice if we could actually teach people, rather than conditioning them to believe that entire subjects are impossible for them to learn. The latter is nothing but a great disservice, and should never be funded with public money.
Long Live rms, and Happy Coding. ⬆
Licence: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 (public domain)