Jeff Wise has a piece in this week's NY Magazine about teaching kids to code which features my partner Albert's home school and great programs like Code.org and Girls Who Code. It also talks about the work my colleagues and I are doing to bring CS education to all of NYC's public schools.
Jeff ends the piece with this observation:
Like much tech-world philanthropy, the tech schools are arriving as a fiat from on high, rather than welling up from grassroots demand, and it’s easy to read the education evangelism as motivated, at least in part, by a desire to mainstream techies’ own idiosyncratic way of looking at the world.
Pardon me, but that accusation stings. "A fiat from on high?" "A desire to mainstream our idiosyncracies?"
No good deeed goes unpunished. I know that. But this critique seems so out of left field.
My idiosyncratic view of the world is a place where we all understand how to control the machines that are increasingly controlling our world. It is a place where kids who are headed to flipping hamburgers for a living get an option to do something a bit more stimulating. It is a place where we all have the tools to make things that make our lives better.
Now that I've got that out of my system, I will go do some yoga.
