From our childhood days, we have been told to focus on science and pursue our careers in science. Science is seen as a superior subject or stream, and thus, people think that studying science will open up a lot of opportunities for you soon after your studies. There’s also exists a stereotype that good students go for sciences, while average students go for commerce, and poor students usually go for arts or humanities. This is not true at all.
There are a lot of students who have to take up science after Class 10, even if they’re not interested in studying science at all. A lot of students end up in engineering colleges where they realise that engineering was never their passion. This is because of the wave created by coaching institutes and society in general. People think that if you’re not a part of this wave, you’re lagging behind. That is why a lot of science students are actively, or passively, forced to study and prepare for JEE and NEET even if they don’t want to become an engineer or doctor.
Similarly, there’s this new wave that has been brought by some ed-tech startups, and this is boosting a coding culture among kids through toxic marketing and repetitive ads. The way these startups portraying the wrong picture as truth is hilarious. They say that technology is taking over the world, and if your child isn’t learning to code, then they are definitely lagging behind.
Let’s face the reality, not all the kids will grow up to work in the coding sector, not all of them are going to be billionaires or millionaires, and not all kids will get job offers from tech giants to write codes for them. And so, not every child in India needs to learn to code. It depends on the child whether they want to learn to code or not. It shouldn’t be mandatory, it should a choice, an option.
Children should spend their childhood days exploring, playing outdoor games and making memories, not sitting in front of a computer the whole day, randomly typing keys with false hopes.
I still remember when I wrote my first code in Java in Class 8 as a part of academics. That is the first time I said hello to the world of coding and today, I am a first-year B.Sc. Computer Science Honours student.
To learn something, one has to follow some steps, and if you skip any of the steps, you would not be able to learn that particular subject in general. So, if you want to learn to code, you need to know about the computer and its components first. And at the age of 4-5 years, it’s not fair to expect kids to know the computer and how it functions.
There’s no right age to learn to code, you can start at the age of 20 or 40. If you’re not learning to code, then you’re not lagging behind, but if you’re running out of age and time, and not doing the right thing that you want to do and only participating in the wave with everyone else, that is when you’re lagging behind.
If you want to learn Python or any other programming language, all the resources are available online for free. You don’t need to buy expensive courses to learn to code, you just need to make use of free resources available on the internet. Programming is something that you can learn on your own because it’s not just about writing a code; it involves writing, debugging, editing and also messing up with the code.
At the end of the day, it depends on what your kid is interested in. Don’t get carried away by these waves.
Thanks for reading. Have a nice day!
Note: The article was originally published here.