Kids, Computers and a Worrisome Trend

11 Aug 2013 - Nic Ho Chee

It has been an enlightening experience growing up in Britain during the Information Revolution. Rather than welcome the new paradigm, even the best schools were functionally Luddite and had the odd idea that computers were a fad that would crumble in the light of some pastoral age seeing a return to learning by rote and hockey sticks at dawn. The fruit of this broken attitude resulted in the destruction of Computer Programming as a school course and the move towards I.C.T. which trained children to use a set of applications rather than gift them the skills to roll their own.

There is some truth to be found in expecting that the average consumer experience with computers should enable them to be wielded as smooth functioning tools and not rusty implements that need coaxing to life like some of the original Windows 3.1.1 or Windows 95 installs. Even so, we do need to educate people to the point that they have the curiousity to fix their own technology problems when they occur by providing them with the drive to investigate the information world that they are born into. The flip side of this will see our children left behind by the knowledge workers that other countries have already started producing.

An inability to understand the machines that surround us surfaces in many ways, some of which have been enumerated in a new blog post here.