Instead of thinking about school shootings, I decided to take a minute to think about school. Everyone wants to reform school which is why it's constantly getting reformed yet doesn't get any better. How to be competitive in the modern and post modern world. The children have been trained to be information gatherers and transformed into quantified statistics.
It's all about the core curriculum. Add a curriculum of study and make it more cumbersome to get through secondary education. What to take away? Let's take away technology class and replace it with the core subject of computer programming. It can be successfully argued that everyone needs English & Literature. Not everyone uses higher level math and science but everyone benefits from some study into the fundamentals of life and the universe. In addition to all the engineers out there most people engage in some form of programming even if it's just setting up your 4K surround sound smart TV or kids XBox. If you don't know too much about programming, it's modeled on the way we think. We do A,B,C,D, then we make a decision and continue doing E and so on or we jump to X,Y,Z.
My proposal would eliminate the sausage type classes that are usually thrown into the hodgepodge of what we call Technology Class and make a dedicated 3 year minimum computer programming course study. This would include a background of the history of computers, of the internet, of modern technology in general. It could include a robotics class, database, web programming, applets and a never ending stream of variation but should have at least 3 half-year courses in a language like C++,Java, or C#. If you have time to study french for three years, you should have drive to learn a critical tool in the coming economic age.
School politics, I know thankfully nothing about but if I had to guess there would be many bent feelings about moving non math specific business classes out of math and put them into the Computer Science department. Why not just call it engineering, we are all about STEM right? Again, too broad. High schoolers can't do chemical engineering till they've taken chemistry, mechanical engineering until they've done physics, and electrical engineering until they've mastered calculus. You can study electronics and it would still fit in with computer programming.
We're going to need a culture of programming to make the best programmers in the world and if you've heard anything about A.I., the cloud, and cyber warfare it's going to be the primary weapon in the economic and hopefully not military wars of the future. Better to be prepared then left behind.
"Intelligence is in short supply, and wisdom is out of stock." -Diamond_I
