Coding & Literacy

I do not think that coding should be mandatory in schools. I came into this with no knowledge of actual coding, having only ever used Scratch, and I do not feel as if I know more about how to use the internet for having learned a a few lines of HTML and CSS. While it is interesting, knowing how to code in a few body paragraphs and some headers in HTML isn’t going to change how I navigate a webpage. Outside of computer science classes, I don’t see myself using this knowledge.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>
	<title>My first web page</title>
</head>

<body>
	<h1>My first web page</h1>

	<h2>What this is</h2>
	<p>A simple page put together using HTML</p>

	<h2>Why this is</h2>
	<p>To learn HTML</p>

</body>

</html>

While I know that I am not everyone in the world, I am certainly not the only person who is not striving for a career that involves coding, and I don’t think the basics are enough to alter how I understand websites and the internet in general.

I do think that the history of the internet should be taught, as I found it more helpful in understanding why popular social media platforms are the way they are. It also helped me get a better idea of where we’re going technology-wise.

That being said, I believe that there should be little to no actual technology in elementary and middle schools.

Two decades ago, working with digital documents was the exception. Today it is the
norm, the “natural” environment for carrying out research, teaching, and reading.

Burdick et al. 4: Provocations, in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 101.

Reading this quote in the bold, sharp, capital letters it is written in in 4: Provocations reminded me of something else that was more of an exception two decades ago: illiteracy in schools.

Alright, maybe it wasn’t a full two decades ago when this trend started, at least not in America. According to The Harvard Gazette, American students’ reading scores peaked for fourth graders in 2015 and eighth graders in 2013. In more recent years, around 40% of fourth graders and about 30% of eighth graders do not meet even the basic proficiency standards that the National Assessment Governing Board set.

We are reading more than ever, though we don’t realize it. We are constantly bombarded by advertisements and captions on videos as we doomscroll. But the lack of focused reading of literature is driving our literacy rates downwards, and we’re reading less because we have these fun little lightboxes that can bring all kinds of more attention-grabbing media to us with a few taps of its screen.

While we can’t stop kids from watching TV and playing video games forever, nor do I think we should try, removing most technology from the classroom might help reawaken an interest in reading. At the very least, students will be forced to learn to spell without their computers fixing it for them, and they won’t have AI to write their essays.

This was a lot of words to say that I don’t find coding to be a necessary skill for the general populace, even as the world changes. Knowing how to make a computer write “Hello World!” will not save us from deteriorating attention spans and potential illiteracy, nor will it help you understand why Instagram is constantly trying to sell you something. I find internet history to be the far more important subject in this discussion, as knowing where the internet started and who changed it from its original purpose is what will provide a better idea of why websites and apps are the way they are.