Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Over the last 20 years, technology has drastically changed the way we shop, travel, and communicate, among other things.  What’s taking so long for technology to change the way we educate our K-12 youth?

Yes, our K-12 educational system is at the early stages of a transformation, but we have been stuck in this early stage for at least 10 years with no ground breaking advancements. What’s more, under performance is still the norm in most urban public schools with no real progress being made since the tech boom that started in the late 90s.

Lately, I’m seeing more and more emphasis being put on adjusting curriculum to introduce youth to computer science in general and how to program / code more specifically.  Data from a Gallup and Google research study showed that 93% of parents in Georgia want their child’s school to teach computer science and 67% of parents and teachers want computer science to be a required course.

Is this the technology revolution we’ve been waiting for in education? Do we even need a tech revolution to improve our educational system?

First I ask, why would teaching your kid how to code be more important than teaching them how to be a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician or any other trade where there is a significant skilled worker gap?  One could easily argue that it’s far more likely for most people to benefit from their child being required to learn a trade than being required to learn how to code.

Secondly, why have parents and teachers put such an emphasis on teaching computer science over teaching life skills?  Our schools rarely emphasize life skills as part of the standard curriculum and it shows, big time.  Most high school graduates know little to nothing about budgeting, good debt vs. bad debt, healthy relationships, writing business plans, how to read balance sheets and stock charts, or healthy eating and exercise.

• We are facing a childhood obesity epidemic with 20% of children 6 to 19 years old being obese [source]
• Close to 50% of business fail within the first 5 years [source]
• The total credit card debt owed by U.S. consumers is over 1 trillion dollars [source]
• Nearly 50% of all marriages end in divorce [source]
• On a typical day, there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide and on average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million abused women and men. [source]

All of this is a direct reflection of a lack of life skills being taught in our school systems and at home.  It’s great to have all of these “cool” programs that want to teach our youth how to code through workforce readiness initiatives designed to close the skills gap in the tech industry.  But what good will that do if your child grows up obese, sick and in debt after maxing out their credit cards and shutting down their failed business that was so stressful that it caused domestic violence and a divorce.

At least they will know how to code and can get a job working in a cube farm at Google, right?