Coding should replace foreign language
Give high school students the choice between computers or languages
Cameron Nagle is going into computer engineering and would have benefited from high school coding classes.
February 10, 2016
In his first Q&A video with his viewers, popular intellectual Youtuber CGPGrey was asked if he could change anything in the education system what it would be. His response was that he would replace language classes with computer programming classes, also called coding.
His reasoning was that he feels like it would be better than teaching dead languages. (Which may be due to him living in Great Britain, where they do still teach Latin.) This leads to an important question of should schools offer more opportunities to do programming and should this be able to replace foreign language classes.
I would like to start with saying I am not in favor of removing any chance to take a forging language class. However, I am in favor of having the option of taking computer programming instead of French or Spanish. As a student who was accepted into a computer engineering program, I am greatly held back due to the fact that I have not had the opportunity to do in depth coding or in all honesty any coding at all. This will set me back at the beginning of my courses in college since I will not know how to code and other students may.
Students should be able to take classes on computer programming in high school because computers are the future. Coding was mentioned President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday January 12. Even though it was part of a phrase of things he wants to do in his last year in ofice, to be mentioned in that still means it is important.
In an edutopia article “Should Coding be the “New Foreign Language” Requirement?” Anna Adam and Helen Mowers said, “Coding is, after all, both a language and a foreign subject to many students – and much more.” This is very true; many people have little to no exposure to coding, which is holding people back from being exposed to a very important field.
Why would people be against having coding be a foreign language replacement? In a New York Times article “Coding Can’t and Shouldn’t Replace Foreign Language Requirements” Stacie Berdan said, “Being able to speak another language increasingly helps recent graduates get good-paying jobs and then advance more rapidly in them.” Computer science is now the highest paid career for college graduates, which shows that giving students the opportunity to take a computer programming course instead of a foreign language would help those who may not be interested in the computer science field to learn more about it and be able to be put on a path to a well paying job.
