Submitted by Maryland’s legislature is considering a bill to allow computer coding courses to fulfill the foreign language graduation requirement for high school. A similar bill passed the Florida State Senate in 2017 (but was ultimately rejected by the full Legislature), and a federal version proposed by Senators Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, is being considered in Congress.
The animating idea behind these bills is that computer coding has become a valuable skill. This is certainly true. But the proposal that foreign language learning can be replaced by computer coding knowledge is misguided: It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief that science and technology education should take precedence over subjects like English, history and foreign languages.
This is silly. Programming is certainly not a replacement for foreign language skills. That being said, it’s somewhat defensible considering this is an American story, and since they speak English as their first or second language anyway, they can get by in the world pretty well as it is.
I’m in the US and I had to take four years of French in high school. The only thing I ever used it for was ordering in a restaurant. Latin would have been much more useful but it was not offered.
For the average American these languages are pointless. Plus thirty percent of the population can already speak both English and Spanish.
jonsmirl,
Just because you don’t use it doesn’t mean learning it was pointless. Hell, I did a short course on Esperanto once, and it made me see programming languages (and English) in a whole new light.
Those four years would have been much better spent learning how to program computers.
jonsmirl,
The worst computer programmers are the ones who only learn computer programming and nothing outside of their comfort zone.
kwan_e,
I would think the worst computer programmers are the ones who don’t learn computer programming, haha. Am I right?
Regarding article, I don’t have an issue with schools promoting spoken languages or programming languages, but conflating these seems silly to me as they don’t really overlap in use. Why not just promote them separately without pretending that one replaces the other?
I think a lot of the material in our 16 years of typical education could be made redundant in that we never end up using it, I guess there’s a debate to be had around whether learning foreign languages should be considered obsolete now that english is the greatest common divisor across most of the world. To me, it’s more than just languages, it’s also about bridging cultures. Doing away with language studies will likely render US students less knowledgeable (and maybe even less tolerant) of others than we already are.
Perhaps there is a better way to approach education. We could focus on deeper specialization, but one problem is that as more education and jobs are technology oriented (computers/medicine), the faster one’s education becomes obsolete. So why not rearrange work/education such that we start working a few years sooner but intertwine it with ongoing education throughout our careers (ie a month every year). It might be more valuable and relevant than trying to front load our educations as we currently do.
The knee-jerk reaction from employers would probably be to complain about candidates having less education, but I actually think educations could be far better integrated with the job requirements this way. And many companies could benefit from having employees continue their education because realistically a lot of skills and knowledge do become stale when we work full time. Formal education could continue throughout one’s career.
Anyways, just some thoughts!
@post by Alfman 2019-03-19 2:50 am
Those are, by definition, outside the pool of programmers.
Agreed. This type of perspective is a non-negligible part of why I’ve chosen to study Swedish. Old Norse and Old Saxon were pretty closely related, and Swedish has also borrowed a lot from French over the years, so it gives a rather interesting perspective on English.
I think for the average American knowing one or more foreign languages is a very good thing. It helps having a better understanding of ones own language en country in relation to others, and improves the perception of foreigners.
I do think Spanish would be much more useful to an American than French. (It’s also closer related to Latin than French.) I think the average public perception of Latin Americans in the US would improve a lot if every US citizen would learn Spanish. The problem with foreigners learning English after migrating to the US is that their lack of skills in the language reduces their perceived intelligence, while if you’d speak to them in their native language you’d realise you’re speaking to intelligent and expressive people just like anyone else.
I have been on both sides of the fence myself. I’ve lived in Brasil for five years, learned to speak fluent Portuguese, (I already spoke Dutch and English natively) and when I came back in the Netherlands with my Brazilian wife and son it helped me see past the lack of language skills in immigrants and imagine how they’d speak in their native tongue.
As for the idea to treat computer code as a foreign language: it’s ridiculous. Programming languages are not “languages”, they are syntaxes to describe logic and algorithms. Knowing a programming language doesn’t mean you actually know how to program. So if someone were just to learn the syntax of a programming language it would be a waste of time because he wouldn’t be learning the most important part of programming: actually learning to write the logic, algorithms properly and architect them into a well-written application.
Furthermore, even though learning how to develop software can theoretically be done by anyone, it’s not for everyone in the same sense drawing can be learned by anyone but is not for everyone. You really need to like and want it to become proficient with it to a level to actually be able to use it. A lot of people don’t realise that programming is a creative skill. It can’t be used as a replacement for learning a foreign language.
Learning a (real) language, on the other hand, is something everyone has already done at least once in their life, and is not a creative skill but rather one of learning and repetition: a much more suitable requirement for education, and one of much more social value than programming.
For the record: I don’t want to de-incentivise teaching people to learn to program at school, however I think programming, like drawing and other creative skills, is more appropriately taught at lower or middle school rather than High School.
Yogarine,
Yeah, whoever submitted the article must be trolling us. Anyways, when it comes to the language corriculum, there’s also an element of causality involved: languages are more useful the more they’re taught. If we treat them as dead, they’ll become dead. I sometimes feel that the US exists in a bubble when it comes to culture and ideas. I’ve learned a lot about international viewpoints just here on osnews that I wouldn’t have gotten at home.
I’m from the US, and I studied both French and Spanish in high school, then went on to live in Latin America for a while and became fluent in Spanish. I’m a huge believer in studying the liberal arts, and not just seeing education as training for a trade or career; that is to say, it’s important to become educated for education’s sake. That being said, I also agree that the cost-benefit analysis for a native English speaker to learn a foreign language is not favorable. It’s always been valuable for people to be proficient in the lingua franca of their era and area, whether it was Latin, French, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, etc. For better or worse, English is the predominant lingua franca.
While I don’t consider programming languages to be equivalent to foreign languages (“language” is a metaphor, in this case), I do agree that it’s very valuable for people to understand how programming works, even if they never pursue programming as a career. In my university, you could choose between taking a foreign language or taking higher math to satisfy a graduation requirement. I think that’s a good approach for higher education, and that having a programming curriculum for secondary education as an alternative to a foreign language makes a lot of sense.
French has an… odd.. relationship with English. Spanish is definitely more useful for general day-to-day usage (not just here in the US, it’s one of the most spoken languages in the world, right up with Hindi and Mandarin), but French is arguably better if you want historical perspective on English itself, because English originated as a blend of Old Saxon, Old French, ancient Greek, and a smattering of other languages. German is an interesting option for similar reasons (though the north Germanic languages (Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) are arguably a better option than German for the historical perspective (Old Norse had a lot of influence on Old Saxon compared to many other early Germanic languages).
As an American who only knows a tiny bit of just a couple languages outside English, I strongly wish there were real requirements for foreign languages. My highschool didn’t have any such requirement, and neither did my college.
Alfman,
I personally think education needs to be integrated more. Why is history taught separately, when understanding history puts a lot of the “technical” subjects into context? For example, I think most people these days don’t appreciate maths and science because they don’t understand what it took to get here. Maths and science are more interesting, and thus easier to learn, if it means something more than just plugging numbers into formulas.
In the internet connected world, why not teach computer programming and foreign languages together. Collaborate with student programmers in another country using a different language. Programmers from non-English countries speak/write English as a given.
kwan_e,
What I’m finding out now through my kid’s educations, is that a fundamental introduction to calculus would be very useful at a much younger age for that very reason: understanding where all the formulas we were expected to learn actually come from. We started “calculus” in 11th grade, which is fine for advanced topics, but in hindsight the principals of calculus are so fundamental to understanding formulas that students who are deprived of those foundations can struggle to really understand the formulas they’re supposed to be using. Students who start out behind in math because they weren’t good at memorization (*) may end up fearing math and calculus for no good reason.
* Don’t know about you guys, but I feel memorization is way too prominent in US education. I strongly feel that learning how to deal with things and process data are much more valuable than regurgitating facts. Regurgitating facts gets you A’s on tests, but it doesn’t prepare you for life.
This is akin to the “tomato sauce counts as a vegetable” rule prevailing in some US school systems. It’s mostly high fructose corn syrup and tiny piece of pulverized fruit.
Next some Senator from WA will propose that playing Super Mario is a alternative to PE, because of all the jumping.
And please do ignore climate change while you contemplate that the earth is 5,000 years old and that God must indeed be spelled backwards on account of burying all those giant bones
Amazingly this country will still take us to the stars, eating syrup, playing super Mario, worshiping Fido and looking for all those English speaking aliens they grew up with on TV.
NOT a foreign language, IMHO. People don’t converse in code. Well, if they do, they should be flogged and ridiculed!
Drunkula,
They do actually. It’s called source code. Source code is a less ambiguous way of conversing between programmers separated by spacetime. Computers don’t have a need for source code. Source code is purely for us humans to converse with other humans what we are trying to do.
Unless it’s Perl.
kwan_e,
…made me chuckle
Although to be honest I prefer scripting in perl than in bash.
I took 3 years of Latin and one of Spanish in high school, studied pre-modern Greek shortly afterwards, am currently learning Swedish, and have over the years learned bits and pieces of 20+ other languages (I study comparative linguistics as a hobby). I’m also a reasonably active software developer, so I’ve got a bit of an odd perspective on this (especially for an American).
I’d argue that there are four main benefits to learning a foreign language:
1. Being able to communicate more effectively with people who speak that language natively.
2. Developing a better understanding of the culture around that language.
3. Learning to see the world from a different perspective.
4. Making literature and media you would not otherwise have easy access to more accessible.
Learning to program, independent of what programming language is used, trivially provides the third benefit for most people, and helps provide something similar to the first benefit as well. It by definition doesn’t really do much of anything like the fourth, and anything it provides similar to the second is kind of a wash (in the same sense that such a benefit can be gained from just learning any new complex skill).
Unless the language you speak natively is not in the top 10 or so most widely spoken languages in the world, that third point is arguably the single most significant thing about learning a foreign language. Language has a huge impact on how you think, and being able to see things from a different perspective is rather critical to functioning in the modern world. The same kind of thing can actually be seen much easier when comparing programming languages, because much of that difference is presented rather directly in most cases, as opposed to many natural language courses which try to ease people in as gently as possible.
Realistically, I don’t think though that learning to program really provides the same experience in learning that learning a foreign language does. Some of the benefits are similar, but they provide very different environments.
Mine isn’t, and in such scenario polishing ones English probably gives access to largest and most varied pool of people and cultural artefacts… (after all, large part of valuable works from smaller languages end up translated to EN nowadays)