Technology

Tbh, I’m in my 40ies and I don’t think my education was so much better than what younger generations are getting. I’m a software engineer and most of the skills I need now are not skills I learned in school or even university.

I started learning programming when I was 9 because my father gave me his old Apple II computer to see what I would do. At the time, this was a privilege. Most children did not get that kind of early exposure. It also made me learn some English early.

In high school, we eventually had some basic programming classes. I was the guy the teacher asked when something didn’t work. Or when he forgot where the semicolons go in Pascal. During one year, instead of programming, there was a pilot project where we’d learn about computer aided math using Waterloo Maple that just barely ran on our old 486es. That course was great but after two months the teacher ran out of things to teach us because the math became “too advanced for us”.

And yes the internet existed at the time; I had access to it at home starting 1994. We learned nothing about it in school.

When I first went to university I had an Apple PowerBook that I bought from money I earned myself. Even though I worked for it, this was privilege too; most kids couldn’t afford what was a very expensive laptop then, or any laptop. But the reason I’m bringing it up is that my university’s web site at the time did not work on it. They had managed to implement even simple buttons that could have been links as Java applets that only worked on Windows. Those were the people I was supposed to learn computer science from. Which, by the way, at the time still meant “math with a side of computer science”. My generation literally could not study in an IT related field if we couldn’t understand university major level math (this changed quickly in the following years in my country, but still).

So while I don’t disagree about education having a lot of room for optimization, when it comes to more recent technologies like AI, it also makes me a bit salty when all of the blame is assigned to education. The generations currently in education, at least in developed countries, have access to so much that my generation only had when our parents were rich or at least nerds like my father (he was a teacher, so we were not rich). And yet, sometimes it feels like they just aren’t interested in doing anything with this access. At least compared to what I would have done with it.

At the same time, also keep in mind that when you say things like education doesn’t prepare us for AI or whatever other new thing (it used to be just the internet, or “new media”, before), those who you are expecting the education from are the people of my generation, who did not grow up with any of this, and who were not taught about any of it when we were young. We don’t have those answers either… this stuff is new for everyone. And for the people you expect to teach, it’s way more alien than it is for you. This was true when I went to school too, and I think it’s inevitable in a world moving this fast.