As lawmakers in several states begin adding coding courses to the curriculum—in some cases as an alternative to Spanish or French—a complicated question is emerging: Will the next generation of Americans learn code instead of another language? One of the states leading the charge is Florida, where senators last month “overwhelmingly” approved a proposal that would allow high school students to take code in place of a foreign language. . . The state does not have a foreign language requirement for graduates.
These clowns in Florida want students to learn to code instead of learning to speak a foreign language. Which they neither learn nor speak. Students will probably learn to code just as well as they have learned to speak a foreign language: not at all. It’s like that old joke: “Honey, our standard of living is improving every day. Last year, we envied the Joneses their Toyota Camry and this year we are envying them their Audi 8.”
Clarissa's Blog 
This is the relevant statement in your post. Ninety-nine percent of American students who are required to take two years of a foreign language (whether in public school or as a requirement for a college bachelor’s degree) never learn it and never use any of it for the rest of their lives, anyway — just like most of them never use advanced algebra (if semi-complex math is even still a requirement).
Most of them will never use coding in their adult occupations, either. So I guess substituting one useless course for another useless one is reasonable.
In my opinion, the real educational crime is that some schools have actually stopped teaching cursive writing. So today’s schoolchildren are doomed to write in block letters for the rest of their lives! Truly disgusting!
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Please read more carefully. Students in Florida can’t substitute courses in foreign languages with anything because they are not taking these courses.
As for the rest, I already explained to you in great detail the need to learn subjects that “you never use for the rest of your life” and the difference between acquiring a skill and parroting facts but you chose to forget the explanation. What’s up with that?
Rigidity bores me beyond what words can explain. There is a mountain of research showing that an experience with a foreign language – where one uses it for the rest of one’s life or not – dramatically improves one’s capacity to perform in math and physics. There is a mountain ridge of data on how an exposure to a second language improves every measure of academic success and every cognitive skill. This might come as a shock, but different parts of the human brain are interconnected. And I know you are aware of this but like to pretend you don’t.
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Baloney. I’ve known enough American friends all my life to know that the two years of foreign language they took decades ago in pursuit of a liberal arts college degree was worthless. 🙂
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Or sufficient to get them into fights whilst on holiday or “shore leave” … 🙂
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That depends on how bowdlerized their language classes are, Jones. :-p
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You’re THAT nostalgic for D’Nealian and Palmer? Just think, all of your mash notes will be indecipherable to young’uns in another 20 years who’ll write primarily in West-Swiftemojis, a direct descendant of analog calculator words.
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What makes you think I’m talking future tense???
True story: Last month the grocery boy who delivers my groceries handed me a letter (the old-fashioned handwritten kind) from his aunt and asked me to read it to him — it was in cursive and he could only read block print.
The letter was in Spanish, a language I never learned — but I recognized enough words from their similarity to Italian to translate most of the letter into English for him.
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See, you used cursive and whatever Italian was rattling around in your brain. Why would you attempt to translate it into English for him if he knew Spanish and you didn’t? Why wouldn’t you just sound it out?
I thought you were spry enough to annoy the people in the grocery store in person. The only people I know who seriously use grocery delivery services have trouble getting around.
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Because I don’t know how to pronounce Spanish phonically, and if I’d tried to literally “read” the Spanish out loud, the delivery boy wouldn’t have understood my words. He also wouldn’t have understood if I’d translated directly into Italian — so that left our common language English, which he understood quite well.
Oh, I’m quite spry — I go on 8-mile mountain hikes in the local mountains once a month with the equally geriatric but very spry Austrian Society of Arizona, a local non-profit international organization.
But while I’m physically fit, I have a big heart and don’t believe in being selfish. Since I have significantly more money that I’ll ever spend in my lifetime, the only fair thing to do is to spread that wealth around by, say, paying delivery boys to fetch my groceries, paying maids to come clean my house once a month, and paying a yard crew to come periodically to tend to my yard and keep all the desert plants blooming well. (Isn’t that actually Socialist Bernie’s basic philosophy, anyway — roll the money downhill, so everybody gets a share?)
So you see, Shakti, not all of us Republicans are bastards. 🙂
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This again? It was a big discussion in the 80s, too.
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Okay, so I don’t know that much about American highschools – is there something like chosen subjects that students can pick? The topic then being not so much mandated courses but the just the sheer fact (or sheer conjecture) about what kind of courses are in fact being taken and at the expense of which? Not sure why the legislature would be involved in that, though.
Is it literally people trying to get better returns by multiplying zero with different numbers? How the bloody hell does that even happen?
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When I was in high school in a small town in Tennessee a LONG time ago (literally fifty years ago), students were given several choices of classes which, in effect, resulted in two separate tracks of study, one to prepare students who were going on to college, and an easier track for students who weren’t.
The easier classes included “Home Economics” for girls (primarily cooking skills) and “Mechanical Arts” for boys (basic carpentry and car repair skills). Two years of Spanish was also an optional course, and this was considered an “easy” filler course for people who weren’t going to college. (There were essentially NO Hispanics in Tennessee at the time, so as a practical matter the course was worthless.)
I have no idea what high school courses are like today.
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When I was in high school (Florida not quite as long ago as Dreidel) there were no tracks that I can detect in retrospect. There was a general division into smarter and less smarter groups* but I was in the smart groups and I don’t remember that they talked a lot about college – but then I was tuning out a lot of the time, doing enough to not draw unwanted attention and that was about it.
Starting in jr high we had a very limited number of electives but I was in band (and then also stage band) so that took up my elective time.
IIRC Home Ec for girls and Shop (basic wood/metal work) for boys were recquired but being in band got me out of having to take Shop.
My school had Spanish and French but my brother had crashed and burned badly in Spanish so I wasn’t interested (and Francophone neighbors had managed to kill my budding enthusiasm for French).
I discovered opera in my last year in high school and would have gone for Italian if had made that discovery and it had been available. As it was I began Spanish in local adult ed as the closest equivalent.
*that tracking started in elementary school – the administrators did their best to convince us that the division into groups was arbitrary but all the kids knew it was a division into smart-neutral-dumb groups and were okay with it (in elementary school there was almost no stigma about being in the dumb group).
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@cliff arroyo
I had a similar experience from junior-high school through the first two years of public college at the University of Tennessee, which was a land-grant institution. From junior-high school through twelfth grade, if you took band, you were exempt from all “Physical Education” (gym) classes.
At that time the land-grant public University of Tennessee required all freshmen and sophomores to take two years of “Physical Education,” AND ALSO required all male students to take two years of ROTC courses, including wearing a uniform and marching in formation twice a week. If you took marching band, you were exempt from gym classes, AND wearing the ROTC uniforms and marching about for that course. (All you had to do was take the classroom lecture, which was an easy “A” for a one-day-a-week course, anyway.)
The mandatory ROTC classes ended in the late 1960’s, when anti-Vietnam War riots resulted in the ROTC building being burned to the ground. (By that time I was in medical school, and certainly had no time to participate in campus upheaval.)
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” if you took band, you were exempt from all “Physical Education” (gym) classes.”
No such luck. Had I been given the choice I might have taken Shop over PE but I didn’t have the choice….
I did have to take 2 PE classes after HS and I went for the easy stuff, Tennis because it was offered closer to home. The institution I attended was 30 miles away but I could do tennis through an extension much closer to home and then archery which I managed to finish without accidentally shooting an arrow into anyone which is about my only accomplishment there….
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“… Last year, we envied the Joneses …”
Of course you did. 🙂
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random observation/question Is it just me or does the budding shift of university from something nice for those who want/need it and into the new high school correspond with depletion of content in elementary through high school?
Cursive doesn’t take that long to learn what are they teaching kids instead of cursive?
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Coding cannot replace learning a foreign language. Period. I’ve written code for…many years. And programing is marvelous! It is a wonderful way to learn to think logically and to express in a different way …not to mention taking control of technology in the 21st century.
BUT — making kids take classes in programming won’t help. Just like making them take 2 years of a foreign language makes them “speak the language.” I think people have gotten sacred of a future where robots take all the jobs and are on this coding train…and remember, I am FOR learning to program! But I’m also pragmatic…some people learn, some people get by, some people flourish. And cutting OUT foreign language?
sigh. Other languages are MORE important to how our brains function and how we communication than programming! Half (more?) of those students will never write more code than a simple script or a smidgeon or HTML ..which is not “real” coding. How many hours of instruction are we going to force on them for that?
I admit that education is a hard topic — making kids want to learn is not something I know how to do…but when I see school systems cutting out foreign language and handwriting and MATH for goodness sake… it just seems like people have given up.
So, while I don’t know a lot about foreign language (I took Latin and Greek and loved it), I am a programmer…and I think coding can NOT replace foreign language.
I’ve never understood why Americans (I am one) are so monolingual and are also so PROUD of being monolingual. sigh
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Well, I’m an American who speaks three languages, and after all these years it still riles me to hear Europeans ask smugly why most Americans only speak English.
HINT!: The reason isn’t “stupidity” — it’s called “geography!”
The United States of America is a gigantic nation extending, as the song says, “from sea to shining sea.” Until recently the vast majority of Americans never left the physical borders of the U.S., and 99.9% of the people that any American would meet traveling within that vast single nation inevitably spoke exactly the same language — ENGLISH. So why should the average American waste time learning a foreign language that he or she would never need to use?
“Europe” is a multi-national concept, composed of tiny little nations jammed right next to each other, each speaking its own unique language. In Europe, if you want to do business with your neighbor a hundred kilometers or so west, you learn that neighbor’s language; then, if you also want to interact with your neighbor a hundred kilometers north or south, you have to learn a third language as well; and if you want to do business with the big powerhouse nations on your continent, you also learn at least “business-level” German and French — get the idea?
That doesn’t make Europeans smarter than Americans; it simply means that they’re doing what’s necessary under their specific circumstances. If the different states within the United States (say, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia) all had separate languages, Americans would grow up multilingual, too.
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I understand why Americans don’t naturally learn multiple languages …kids growing up in multilingual countries will learn multiple languages naturally. I mean the sort of perverse pride they seem to have that English is all that is necessary and everyone should just learn English. The idea that learning a foreign language is “useless.”
I agree that Europeans are not “smarter” or anything of that nature — most of the multiple languages probably come about (as you said) due to geography. I also realize that learning a language you aren’t going to use is a luxury that not everyone has… still, there is a difference between saying, “I personally don’t have the time or drive to pick up another language, but it is a useful skill” and “well, gee whiz, why would anyone speak anything OTHER than English?”
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In the globalized world of today and tomorrow, remaining sulkily parochial is shooting oneself in the foot. But if people want to do that to themselves, let them. There will be less competition for those of us who are not as scared of the changing world.
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I have a problem with the whole “most people will never use it” kind of reasoning. Because, technically, there are very few things one will definitely need to learn:
a) reading (so one can understand government forms or correspondence from one’s clients or from the companies whose client one is… but then one can claim that this job can be taken over by computerized devices that will read to the people)
b) writing (for the same purposes, and with the same caveats)
c) math including addition, subtraction multiplication and division (enough to fill the tax forms… but someone may rightfully argue that learning to use the calculator is enough… and, by the way, does our society really want a regular Joe to understand the fine print of the credit card agreements? :))
d) the “correct” version of history and social science – who were the good guys and who were the bad guys (so the future citizen would be less likely to join some socialists or terrorists).
All that (except perhaps d) can be taught in one year.
I suspect our society is not so libertarian as to openly follow the above logic and make education above the second grade non-obligatory (and therefore not funded by the taxpayers). So let’s teach the kids more useful things while they are in storage so their parents could do the work… We can return to this discussion once robots displace more workers and the role of the school as a storage chamber will be sufficiently eroded. 🙂
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It is especially interesting that Florida is one of the states that is trying to get rid of foreign languages. As if speaking Spanish in Florida was a handicap.
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I’m very much for coding classes, but replacing language classes with programming classes is pretty weird and dysfunctional.
Clarissa doesn’t need any of my help for defending the teaching of foreign languages in high schools, but I’d still like to mention that learning a foreign language is a skill like any other, and one these kids better have unless you can promise them that they’ll never need to leave their hometowns (or places like them) for the next 60 years, and also that said hometowns will remain unchanged.
As for coding classes themselves, I notice that nobody seems to have thought why exactly they want to teach these coding classes. The low-level coding jobs a few years of highschool coding classes can prepare you for don’t really exist in the US anymore, having all been outsourced to Eastern Europe and India (and we’re back to the foreign languages problem – English (or French, or German) might be the business language for these code outfits, but you’re not getting hired if you don’t speak the local language unless they need your specific skillset enough to compromise on this, which doesn’t often happen). These programs won’t create more high-quality CS programs in US universities, especially not above undergrad level, so you’re not going to get any more kids getting the 200k-a-year Silicon Valley jobs than you already are. So the point of these classes won’t be getting a skill that’s useful by itself (not unless you’re making this a Raspberry-Pi-and-scripting-languages kind of shop class, but if someone suggested cutting out foreign languages classes for mechanics or home economics they’d be rightfully laughed out of town) but developing certain non-programming skills/perspectives that are widely applicable in one’s adult life through the teaching of programming. And I’m not going to deny these exist, but since we’re not even having the beginning of a conversation about what these skills/perspectives are and whether coding classes are the best way to develop them and how do they compare with the skills/perspectives developed by foreign languages, that’s not the argument for it either. The argument for it seems to be pompous grandstanding covering up unconscious anxieties, and nothing good ever comes out of drastic changes made because of pompous grandstanding covering up unconscious anxieties.
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Think of it as buffet intellectualism carried over into STEM.
“Ah, yes, we have this amazing a la carte assortment from the humanities … and perhaps you would try a smidgen of Computer Programming in Languages That Do Not Require Advanced Abstractions or Concepts as a substitute for some of those?”
Sorry, I’ll take the wafer-thin mint. 🙂
If it’s all more or less the same stuff on the buffet cart, and if the people doing the teaching can be reliably counted on to be even less up to the task of pedagogy than Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmasters”, then why not pass off “Coding in Languages for the Average Joe” as the same as learning German?
The best hope in this situation is that the students realise they’re being conned to a large degree and that they will go on to learn the proper things in their proper measures, which is to say that they learn German so they can think about languages and that they learn something like C++ so they can think about computers.
Why would they believe they’re being offered genuine goods when it’s clear that they’re being offered Education For Rounded Squares Who Can Be Forced To Fit In Round Holes instead?
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Someone asked above what choices students in high schools have when it comes to electives. That depends entirely upon the school district. If you live in a well-to-do suburb of a major metropolitan area, you will have choices that include programming and beginning engineering; my kid’s high school now has a three-D printer and students learn how to program for it.
If you live in a poor inner-city or rural district…not so much.
Also, I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with Dreidel. I think removing cursive handwriting from the elementary school curriculum is a crime. I wonder how people will learn to sign their names. Hopefully, when this era of the Common Core and High Stakes Testing and the rest of it is over, cursive will be restored.
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One can also go too far in the direction of cursive. My mother brought me tons of exercise books to teach Klara to write cursive in Russian. I don’t know what makes people think I hate this kid enough to put her through Russian cursive. 🙂
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Well, teach her cursive in the Roman alphabet, which should cover most of the languages she’ll eventually need to write something in.
Sooner or later, some years down the road, Klara will feel obligated to write a handwritten thank-you note (assuming that she’s been raised with proper manners, of course).
Even a short letter composed of a few paragraphs can be written more quickly in cursive than in block letters, and it looks a lot more classy. 🙂
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The Roman alphabet cursive, of course. But Cyrillic is just crazy.
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