BGB <[email protected]> writes: > and, one can ask: does your usual programmer actually even need to > know who the past US presidents were and what things they were known > for? or the differences between Ruminant and Equine digestive systems > regarding their ability to metabolize cellulose? > > maybe some people have some reason to know, most others don't, and for > them it is just the educational system eating their money.
My answer is that it depends on what civilization you want. If you want a feudal civilization with classes, indeed, some people don't have to know. Let's reserve weapon knowledge to the lords, letter and cheese knowledge to the monks, agriculture knowledge to the peasants. Now if you prefer a technological civilization including things like nuclear power (but a lot of other science applications are similarly "delicate"), then I argue that you need widespread scientific, technical and general culture (history et al) knowledge. Typically, the problems the Japanese have with their nuclear power plants, and not only since Fukushima, are due to the lack of general and scientific knowledge, not in the nuclear power plant engineers, but in the general population, including politicians. > so, the barrier to entry is fairly high, often requiring people who > want to be contributors to a project to have the same vision as the > project leader. sometimes leading to an "inner circle of yes-men", and > making the core developers often not accepting of, and sometimes > adversarial to, the positions held by groups of fringe users. This concerns only CS/programmer professionnals. This is not the discussion I was having. >>> so, the main goal in life is basically finding employment and basic >>> job competence, mostly with education being as a means to an end: >>> getting higher paying job, ... >> Who said that? > > I think this is a given. > > people need to live their lives, and to do this, they need a job and > money (and a house, car, ...). No. In what you cite, the only thing need is a house. What people need are food, water, shelter, clothes, some energy for a few appliances. All the rest is not NEEDED, but may be convenient. Now specific activities or person may require additionnal specific things. Eg. we programmers need an internet connection and a computer. Other people may have some other specific needs. But a job or money is of use to nobody (unless you want to run some pack rat race). > likewise goes for finding a mate: often, potential mates may make > decisions based largely on how much money and social status a person > has, so a person who is less well off will be overlooked (well, except > by those looking for short-term hook-ups and flings, who usually more > care about looks and similar, and typically just go from one > relationship to the next). This is something to be considered too, but even if it's greatly influenced by genes, http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm I'm of the opinion that human are not beasts, and we can also run a cultural "program" superceding our genetic programming in a certain measure. (Eg. women don't necessarily have to send 2/3 of men to war or prison and reproduce with, ie. select, only 1/3 of psychopathic males). Now of course we're not on the wait to any kind of improvement there. But this is not the topic of this thread either. >>> probably focusing more on the "useful parts" though. >> No, that's certainly not the purpose of high-school education. > > usually it seems more about a combination of: > keeping students in control and under supervision; > preparing them for general "worker drone" tasks, by giving them lots > of busywork ("gotta strive for that A" => "be a busy little worker bee > in the office"); Yes, and in designing a new educational program I see no reason to continue in this way. > now, how many types of jobs will a person actually need to be able to > recite all 50 states and their respective capital cities? or the names > of the presidents and what they were most known for during their terms > in office? > > probably not all that many... This kind of background, cultural knowledge could make you avoid costly errors, the more so in the information age. Like some geographic knowledge can let you avoid taking an airplane ticket to Sidney and arrive in tropical shirt and shorts in North Dakota under 50 cm of snow. And some basic chemical or nuclear knowledge can let a janitor avoid leaking radioactive gases from a Japanese nuclear plant, like it occured some years ago. >>> 1: it is not a good sign when one of the first major questions usually >>> asked is "how do I use OpenGL / sound / GUI / ... with this thing?", >>> which then either results in people looking for 3rd party packages to >>> do it, or having to write a lot of wrapper boilerplate, or having to >>> fall back to writing all these parts in C or similar. >> This is something that is solved in two ways: >> >> - socially: letting the general public have some consciousness of what >> CS is and what it can do, so that they can contract a CS/programmer >> professionnal to solve their problem, just like they do eg. with a MD >> when they have a health problem. And the MD doesn't use the same >> tools and the same drugs than what you do at home: he has his own >> specialized and powerful tools and drugs. >> >> - technically: providing programmable software systems that are more >> easily usable by the general public. Ie. NOT C, more Lisp, Python, >> and integrated programming environment like indeed Hypercard. > > maybe JavaScript?... Indeed that may be a possibility. What I don't like so far is the "ecosystem". Ie. you get a browser, not a "development" environment, much less something like Hypercard. But this could be provided yes. But do we really want to base such a system on a language designed in 10 days? Let's be serious. The impact is not a few hackers losing their time with strange behavior, it'll be six billion people time! >> But otherwise indeed tools could be developed to translate from one >> high-level general public language to the other, but this is something >> that would only be needed in the new world. > > I disagree here. > > I have seen many small/hobby projects which make heavy use of > copy/pasted code (and often data as well), and this is actually more > how many people learn to write actually serious code, so is hardly a > "professionals only" problem. Well, perhaps. This is not my way to learn how to program (once really) or to learn a new programming language. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
