How to get America back to work

Nowadays, everyone needs people who understand software.

While I am theoretically not opposed to public education, I have seen its effects in the U.S. population, and have heard many legitimate complaints.  As Richard Dawkins so famously put it, people are gene machines.  As such, they desire to reproduce as much as possible and sustain themselves while they are attempting to reproduce

There is nothing immoral about this; it has been the state of things far longer than humans have.  Any "morality" that women and men invent is less likely, on average, to motivate than basic needs like food, clean water, shelter, and sex.  Again, some people mourn this as evidence that people are somehow "evil" or "immoral," but one must first see reality accurately before one can change it in a sensible way

Back to education.  People gotta eat.  In America, people gain social status and access to mating by getting lots of stuff.  Electronic stuff, nice-looking house stuff, fancy food stuff, pretty clothes-stuff, fast car stuff, the list goes on.  And what's the fastest way to get stuff nowadays?  Be useful to someone else, particularly if one's useful skills are in short supply.  If you're the only one on Earth who knows how to grow rice twice as fast as everyone else, you'll be pretty popular.  The people over at Monsanto figured out how to do that with this funny thing Americans have now called "patent law"

So you gotta eat, and you probably want to breed at some point.  Perhaps more importantly than the physical act of breeding, you want your kids to survive and thrive to the extent that they can breed, etc.  If this is priority number one, where is it in the public school system?

Why do we teach civics to young people when young people don't vote?  Why do we teach literature to young people when young people don't read?

There aren't too many generalizations that are true about a large group of people, but most young people in the "developed" world nowadays interact with computers everyday.  Smartphone, tablets, laptops, even their thermostat.  So it's not a stretch to say that you could make them interested in how these things work.  When I started learning how computers work, I was interested, if only because now my world made a lot more sense

But middle schools don't teach it!  This is the real solution to America's economic ills.  We groom our brightest to become scientists, professors, and literary critics, when the path to financial stability and working infrastructure is programming and maintaining computers.  Now, I'm not saying everyone should be a computer programmer.  If you think you've got a Bill Shakespeare in your kindergarten class, by all means, encourage him/her to read and write all the time.  But many children do not have clear occupational strengths at age 8.  Even then, given the choice between putting an analytical mind down the path towards the physical sciences and shuttling them into software, the economy is pretty clear on which products and services are worth more to people

Bill Gates first saw a computer at 13.  But he had an extraordinarily privileged background, and went to one of the most competitive, wealthy schools in Seattle, one of the richer places in the world at the time.  Imagine if he hadn't!  Imagine if he went to one of the notoriously lousy public schools in Los Angeles and didn't see a computer until he was thirty-something.  The world would look a bit different than the one we're familiar with.  And now it's so much easier to program a computer!  Languages are human-like.  You can buy time on a server much cheaper than in Gates' day, and the computers are many times faster on top of that.  We don't really have an excuse for not teaching our best and brightest

Say we only focused on the college level.  Computer Science curricula are still highly theoretical, and many professors have never had a job in industry.  Pay someone like Bjarne Stroustrup or Linus Torvaalds to teach your undergrads, and you'll have a few students who go out to become quite rich and capable of donating generously to your university's coffers later in life

It really isn't that complicated.  The Indian and Chinese immigrants who "steal our jobs" largely go into fields like computer science and statistics that pay well because they are practical.  When American kids complain about "not being able to get a job," that problem can be fixed fairly simply by practical job training much younger in their public education.  I've studied physics, and let me tell you: programming computers is peanuts compared to some of those integrals

This is doable, and it's doable today.  We might not see the effects for a generation, but anyone who is serious when they say the words "stimulate the American economy" or "invest in our children" could be enacting reform today in this arena.  In fact, if you are so inclined, you can call up your Senator, Congressman, or local Board of Education today and get someone on this

The most important thing is that now you don't need to be fooled when some candidate says something vague like "get America back to work" and lacks a real plan to do it.  It has nothing to do with clean energy, although in the long term that could help some people out too.  It has everything to do with putting schools in touch with companies that need software engineers and learning how to teach practical, hire-able skills to kids who just want to get by

And again, I say that with no moral judgment.  It's just that a man's gotta eat