[Edu-sig] Programming in High School

[Paul D. Fernhout]

David MacQuigg wrote:
 > What ever happened to the original enthusiasm with Computer Programming
 > for Everyone?  If everyone with a high school diploma knew how to write a
 > simple program, not only would we be more productive, but we would
 > understand the world better.  Instead of loose talk and isolated numbers,
 > the news would show us charts.  The general public, not just experts,
 > would have seen the very obvious bubble growing in the housing market,
 > and could see now where we are on the down side.  What if the average
 > real estate agent could show me the price trends on property similar to
 > what I am looking at.  Instead, I have to dig out the data myself, and
 > plot it in Excel.  Then when I show her the result, she still doesn't see
 > the significance.

Many years ago someone said (probably Kirby, and probably on this list) 
essentially that while "computing" is taught in school as if it were a 
subset of schoolish "math", it's really more true that schoolish "math" is a 
subset of "computing". Obviously, real knock-your-socks-off math subsumes 
*everything*, as in physics is a subset of math in a way, but that is not 
the case either in most K-12 schools. And even then, the lines between 
computing and math are starting to blur, as even modern physicists now spend 
a lot of time with their computer simulations that their base equations. So, 
I feel from a practical point of view, computing should be introduced as 
early as possible in education (perhaps after, say age seven and kids get 
the real world at an intuitive level), and learning to do schoolish math 
(including algebra, trigonometry, logical proofs of correctness, and so on) 
should flow from that. And, for example, you can then link things like 
physics, chemistry, and biology (and even English and history) into a 
computer base curriculum using simulation and data acquisition.

On the larger issue:

David MacQuigg also wrote:
> At 06:52 PM 12/8/2008 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 5:10 PM, David MacQuigg
>> <macquigg at ece.arizona.edu> wrote:
>>> At 03:30 PM 12/8/2008 -0800, michel paul wrote:
>>>> I think part of the problem in the past has been the
>>>> misunderstanding about tech jobs getting outsourced.  I've heard
>>>> people say there's no point in becoming a programmer, because all
>>>> the jobs are going overseas.  It's really kind of silly.
 >>>
>>> Stated that way, it does seem circular.  I've heard it stated more
>>> convincingly by an EE prof to a class of undergrads.  "If you go into
>>> engineering, you will be facing layoffs."  Imagine the effect of that
>>> expectation on smart students who see their buddies going into law or
>>> medicine, and getting more pay and more respect than engineers.  It's
>>> no wonder there are almost no US students in our graduate classes.
>>> I've thought about what I would have said to those students.  It
>>> would be more like "If money is your major motivation, find another
>>> profession.  If technology is in your blood, stay with it.  Learn
>>> everything you can.  The money will come out OK."
 >>
>> I read this as: Engineering is something where mediocrity doesn't pay. 
>> Doctors and lawyers are like cobblers, their output is limited by the 
>> number of hours they can work, so there is room for good solid workers 
>> who aren't particularly innovative. Engineering at its best is not like
>> that at all. It's a field whose main *point* is to make manual labor
>> redundant. Good engineers do their work because it's their passion. The
>> rest... Well they can always try to earn a living cranking out Java
>> code. ;-)
> 
> I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea that engineering is a field where
> only the brightest should feel comfortable.  There is plenty of need for
> good solid workers, and I would like to see our schools and our economy
> support that.  If we outsource the grunt work, and hope to keep just the
> top geniuses employed, eventually we lose the top also.  I remember in
> the 80's thinking the Japanese could never catch up with us in circuit
> design.  They just didn't have the creative spark.  It wasn't in their
> culture.

On this general topic of the cultural context of engineering education,
here a few ideas about historical trends, and one speculation based on 
projecting things forward a couple decades from what Guido said elsewhere.

After WWII, the USA was the only significant manufacturing power. Europe and 
much of Aisa were either in rubble, social turmoil, or both. The Southern 
hemisphere still had little infrastructure too. So, it could be expected 
that the manufacturing base in the USA would grow as it made stuff for the 
world, and like China today, this would be a good position to be in, having 
the world depending on it for stuff. But over the decades, this unusual 
situation has shifted, and while the USA still sells a lot of manufactured 
goods, as the world has rebuilt in some places and developed industrially in 
others, a more normal situation is reestablishing itself. Culturally, it is 
true that different places have different strengths and weaknesses, like 
Japan may struggle with too much conformity. On the other hand, the rest of 
the world now seems to be more quickly getting the cooperative nature of 
developing "free and open source" software, content, and physical design.

Also, before, during, and after WWII, the USA received for various reasons a 
  significant influx of educated immigrants, like Einstein and van Braun, 
and many others (including those the USA scooped up from the ruins of 
post-WWII Germany). These are the people who helped give the USA atomic 
energy (and weapons) and who helped put a person on the moon, among many 
other innovations, flowing out of the grasp these people had of math and 
practical engineering. To an extent, the USA has been riding this 
intellectual capital instead of developing a culture that can as easily 
create educated people as the playful tradition of Germany up until the 
early 1930s. Over the last few decades, as these people have aged and died, 
the USA has lost some of its edge as well. Obviously, the USA can produce 
some educated people, but, as with manufacturing, the relative dominance 
again has been lost.

Also, for reasons of basic capitalism, formerly USA-based firms have seen it 
profitable in the short term to exploit a highly valued dollar to do 
operations oversee, as well as exploiting the relative greater social 
inequality in those countries (as one H1B holder from India put it to me, 
back in India he could afford a lot of servants on what he was earning and 
saving). Also, US citizens as contractors usually commanded a multiple of 
the prevailing wage for short term contracts, whereas H1Bs only need be paid 
the "prevailing wage" (what is not said is, "of an employee, not a 
contractor".) So, all those factors have made it more profitable for US 
firms to train foreign nationals in technology, again eroding any edge the 
USA had resulting from the above two factors.

Where does that leave future students? As the US dollar falls (the current 
rise is only short term as people sell dollar-denominated assets and hold 
the cash, unsure how to invest), this fall will make outsourcing less 
profitable, so US manufacturing will get some good news. Similarly, as other 
countries address internal inequities of their own rich-poor divides, it 
will also get harder to outsource or use H1Bs profitably (no more hiring a 
chauffeur, maid, and a cook on a programmer's salary, so why bother working 
for US Americans?). So, in the long term, that is all good news for US 
students interested in manufacturing. It is my hope that rather than the US 
standard of living significantly falling, that it will just stay static as 
the rest of the world catches up, with better technology in the USA 
offsetting other financial losses (like, your job pays less, but playing 
games at home is more fun and educational and more fulfilling socially, like 
the Wii is a first example of).

But there are two other counter-trends to the good news which are more serious.

One is the collapse of the value of the PhD in the USA, as documented by Dr. 
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of Caltech. His essential point is that the 
educational system mines and sort and polishes students looking for a few 
PhD-quality students, while discarding the rest. He says this emphasis needs 
to change for two reasons. One is that the discarded students are left 
mostly scientifically and technically illiterate which is wasteful and a 
threat to a democracy dependent on technology. The other reason is that 
academeia grew exponentially until the 1970s in the USA, creating plenty of 
jobs for people with PhDs, but that era is over and now most PhDs being 
created are surplus. When I look at the academic departments I have been 
part of in the past, and see most of the same professors there who were 
there in the 1980s and 1990s, this rings all to true. There are just not 
many new slots compared to the number of science PhDs produce. Industrial 
R&D is small, to begin with. So, we see more and more call for PhDs in K-12 
or other situations (but that is not the expectation these people had, so 
they are often unhappy). Medicine and Law, on the other hand, by tightly 
controlling the number of related schools producing such professionals, and 
continually lobbying for increased restrictions on who can practice has 
managed to create an artificial scarcity of doctors and lawyers, which keeps 
their salaries up. There were many things common in the past, like passing 
the bar exam without going to law school, or pharmacists prescribing 
medicines, or midwives delivering babies at home, which are pretty much 
illegal now. But anyone can practice computer programming. I can take my car 
to a good mechanic without much of an appointment, but I may need to wait 
weeks or months to see a competent doctor -- because of this artificial 
scarcity. This isn't an argument for licensing programmers, I'm just 
pointing to the historical difference. By the way, there are at least two 
big tiers of doctors -- family practice and specialist, and while in my 
opinion family practice sounds harder, it is the specialists who get the 
extra training and get the big bucks, so there is some room there for the 
more ambitious. In any case, when you couple the collapse of the PhD pyramid 
scheme system in a sense, along with outsourcing and H1Bs, then it is no 
wonder people who thirty years ago would have pursued advanced study in 
science or engineering are now tempted by law or medicine. The law is a lot 
like programming (based on precedent, or subroutine call :-) and medicine 
these days is more and more science and technology driven. Still, even if we 
were to quadruple the numbers of doctors produced per year (please, no more 
lawyers :-), at 100,000 (up from 25000 per year) that would not at all 
accommodate the millions of kids a year interested in science and 
engineering.  And of course, many doctors are unhappy because of insurance 
reimbursement and other societal issues. And nurses and aids are already in 
short supply as the jobs are very stressful with little control or 
recognition. So, in short, there is no where for most of these kids to go to 
apply their skills in a profitable and pleasant way, at least, not on terms 
anywhere like those people were getting thirty years ago.

The other is an even more serious issue that that. It was predicted in the 
1960s, and echoes Guido's point of "Engineering at its best is not
like that at all. It's a field whose main *point* is to make manual
labor redundant." To amplify on Guido's point, see:
   "The Triple Revolution":
   http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is 
that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird 
people’s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been 
distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and 
men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing 
cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems 
of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As 
machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion 
of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and 
unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security, 
welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a 
historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is 
subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when 
sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone 
in the U.S. ... The industrial system was designed to produce an 
ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was 
assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would 
occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link 
as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for 
granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost 
unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

If you want a more modern take on this, see Marshall Brain's sci-fi:
   "Manna"
   http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
or his non-fiction:
   "Robotic Nation"
   http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Or you could see the writing of any of a number of other technologists, like 
Ray Kurzweil:
   "The Law of Accelerating Returns"
    http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

My own take on this:
   "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
The most important point there is: "Capitalism is often it seems all about 
cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what 
happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do 
economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic 
equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero? "

But going back to Marshall Brain's non-fiction, he writes in Robotic Nation: 
"I don't think anyone in 1900 could imagine the B-52 happening in 54 years. 
Over the next 55 years, the same thing will happen to us with robots. In the 
process, the entire employment landscape in America will change. Here is why 
that will happen. ... The arrival of humanoid robots should be a cause for 
celebration. With the robots doing most of the work, it should be possible 
for everyone to go on perpetual vacation. Instead, robots will displace 
millions of employees, leaving them unable to find work and therefore 
destitute. I believe that it is time to start rethinking our economy and 
understanding how we will allow people to live their lives in a robotic 
nation. ..."

Ultimately, money on education now is not going to make much of a difference 
in twenty or thirty years as far as the "competitiveness" that schools and 
business people are often talking about, see:
  "IBM CEO Sam Palmisano's speech at the Council of Foreign Relations on "A
Smarter Planet""
  http://www.cfr.org/publication/17696
if, as predicted, following Moore's law and exponential growth, you can buy 
a computer that can run a human-level AI for about $1000 in 2038 or sooner.
   "When will computer hardware match the human brain?"
   http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

I developed this theme here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72330a22bcae8928?hl=en
"""
The handwriting is on the wall, not just for compulsory schools, but for 
other large parts of our social structure they link up with. It's not 
necessarily a bad message either, if we accept it and try our hardest to 
make the best of it. It's not like one day the robots and AIs will suddenly 
take over (I hope). It is more like bit by bit things will continue to 
change and these things will show up in our lives, and our social network 
will shape them based on our priorities. For example, luxury cars have moved 
from anti-lock brakes, then to GPS course routing, then to Electronic 
Stability Control, and now the big thing is adaptive cruise control using 
radar to maintain a fixed distance from the next car, and also automatic 
parallel parking. Soon more safety features will be common to detect 
swerving lane changes, to drive by radar in fog, to brake fast and swerve to 
avoid deer, and so on, until before we know it, we decide in about ten or 
twenty years that it's safer to let the car drive itself than give the keys 
to our teenagers:
   "GM: Self Driving cars on the road in 10 years" 
http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2008/01/gm-self-driving-cars-on-road-in-10.html
"""

I also list there how a various occupations are already being automated and 
are likely to disappear in the next couple of decades, like: Check out 
clerk, Cab driver, Heart Surgeon, Airline pilot, Nurse, Entertainer, 
Athlete, Migrant agricultural laborer, Librarian, Artist, Designer, and 
Miner. I could probably list more, but that seems long enough to make the 
point. What will a student in kindergarten today be expected to do for a 
profession in twenty years if they need to compete with robots and other 
automation to make a living? This isn't like in the 1920s when "buggy whip" 
manufacturers were closing down, or like in the 1950s when the profession of 
"picture tinters" were going away. Back then, there were lots of jobs to go 
to. Right now, between a previous bailout to the car companies to shift to 
alternative vehicles, and the current bailout proposal, the US Congress will 
be handing over about US$50 billion to automotive companies so they will 
*only* cut about one third of their jobs (assuming GM's stated plans are 
similar to the other's unstated ones). Again, the US is giving out tens of 
billions of dollars so only one-third the total jobs will be cut, instead of 
all of them. Frankly, those jobs are not coming back anytime soon. While it 
is true that millions of green jobs can be created, many, many millions, and 
should IMHO, even that will not match the job losses from exponentially 
developing automation. Just as one example, this somewhat charitably funded 
think-tank is already making great progress on robots that can work around 
humans:
   http://www.willowgarage.com/
While plumbers may hold on the longest, by 2040, we'll probably see even 
household robot plumbers. Of course, we may not need them if we were to 
redesign plumbing to be easier to maintain -- but even then, the job goes 
away. In a similar way, if you look at the video of Amory Lovins' plan to 
revitalized the US automotive industry here, he outlines snap-together car 
bodies. So, those jobs are going, going, gone. And except for the "Triple 
Revolution" issues related to the politics of distributing wealth, we are 
all better for those jobs being gone, because there are plenty of things 
people prefer to do, whether study math or nature or raise children or play 
music or swim and so on, including building software and robots, just for 
the fun of it.

Anyway, that's the elephant in the living room, when you extrapolate from 
Guido's observation. :-)

So why should kids learn programming and advanced computer use?
* Fun.
* A gateway to more fun in science and engineering.
* A way to make sure the robots are friendly (or at least, enough of the 
dumber ones are reasonably obedient).
* A way to have confidence in an ability to interact and control the future 
world they will live in (ala, Computer Programming for Everybody).

All the best to everyone here. I will now go back to lurking. :-)

--Paul Fernhout