Teach Children Programming in School

Teaching children to code in school is an ambitious goal every state should embrace if it wants to keep pace with relentless technological change.

In early 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg added learning to code to his public goals. It may sound odd for a mayor in his seventies — but the decision was deeply wise.

Think about your daily device use: you browse for sites, use social apps, play games. The verbs are all consumptive — browse, use, play. Engagement rarely crosses into creation.

We label younger generations “digital natives,” yet most remain consumers, not makers. Building still feels like magic reserved for a gifted few.

Using technology is not the same as creating it. Listening to music does not make you a composer. Matching consumption with production matters — and we neglect the latter far too often.

Treat programming like language. As an infant you could only cry; language unlocked precision. Likewise, using apps without ever making them leaves a developmental gap we should not ignore.

Today’s programmer is tomorrow’s leader.

A generation that can build as much as it consumes must start early. Adults can learn to code, but programming is also problem-solving, debugging, solution design, and delivery — skills often harder to teach later than sooner.

Programmer Linda Liukas argues the future holds more software and less hardware — cloud replaced discs; phones replaced cards; digital payments spread. Such a world, she says, must be built by everyone, not a priesthood no one understands.

On TED, Liukas replaces jargon with stories. Her book Hello Ruby casts Ruby, age six, who treats errors as clues under the bed — mistakes move her toward answers.

She introduces kids to the Internet of Things. In a workshop she showed drawings of a car, dog, shop, toilet — kids saw no “computers.” She explained GPS in cars, collars on dogs, POS systems, even “smart” toilets in Japan — some of which hackers have targeted.

Mitch Resnick at MIT leads Scratch — not dense syntax but draggable blocks that build interactive stories and animations.

Resnick tells TED how a child struggling with a Scratch game grasped variables, placed one correctly, and solved the puzzle — then thanked him effusively. He wondered how often algebra teachers receive that kind of gratitude.

Return to Liukas’s point: more coders will steer the world. Picture a spring drive on a highway: a truck ahead sheds steel bars; a reckless motorcyclist is on your right; a careful family on your left. A bolt fails; bars fall. The autonomous car must decide in milliseconds.

Stay put and you die; swerve right and kill the rider; swerve left and injure the family. Minimizing harm still encodes ethics — and “rewarding recklessness” would be its own failure mode.

The dilemma is hard; the deciders are programmers — often a tiny group behind opaque systems. That is why Bloomberg’s late-life coding pledge mattered: today’s programmer shapes tomorrow.