The Most Important Priority for Education

Giovannino de'Grassi, Gothic letters from a model book Illumination. Parchment, Biblioteca Civica, Bergamo. 1390

I will give you a one sentence solution on how to improve education on a personal and national level. In fact if implemented by a country I guarantee that this country will be propelled into the economic leadership virtually instantaneously. The invention of the alphabet set the stage for current civilization. More specifically Judaic civilization runs on Hebrew, the Roman Empire on Latin, Islam on Arabic, philosophy on Greek, etc. Reformation set the stage for the vernacular, the printing press, literature, journalism, theater, industrialization and modern world as we know it. These are all codes, programming languages civilizations use. In the world defined by the Internet people communicate via a programming code. At the moment, similarly to the dawn of the original language based civilizations, only geeky priests can read and write and often they rip the financial benefit. Any nation that takes seriously the programming literacy and introduces computer science into schools is the clear contender for leadership. Douglas Rushkoff writes about this – It’s not too late for humanity to survive the digital:

“Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us really knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of the technology for themselves.

Like those failed media renaissances before this one, we remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gain the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; we write, while our techno-elite program. As a result, a majority of people remain one dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind those who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.”

If computer is at the center of our civilization than being able to write in computer speak is the basis of literacy. The choice is pretty stark, slavery to the new priesthood or freedom. And I know the American sentiment. The only way to earn the freedom in the new world is to master the written language. Towards this immediate goal teaching of computer science in schools is the most important priority for education. The old argument that all those “machines” are just the chariots for content is undermined by the reality that the costs of content gravitates to zero, while the price of platforms that run the content scales exponentially. Yet there is a concern that this skill is outsourceable. Indeed there are scribes who could be compared to the copier monks during the manuscript era. Yet the original texts and supervision of the scribes is still very much by the new priesthood, capable or reading and writing the canonical codex.

Image published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art