Re^5: Best age to start learning perl

[gwadej]

While I agree with much of what you say, I have to disagree with this point.

The early stages of education should stop concentrating on "the 3 Rs"--calculators do the 'rithmetic; spell-checkers and speech recognition will take care of the 'riting.

The ability to do basic math is extremely important. We have enough trouble with people unable to distinguish between reality and stuff that's real because the computer said so. I remember back during my engineering education, one professor spending a lot of time trying to get students to understand the numbers they were working with instead of just believing what came out of the calculator. GIGO still rules.

We see many examples daily of bad writing that has been blessed by a spell checker, but not actually proofread. Wrong homonym chosen. Misspelling that happens to be a legal word. The number of errors can sometimes be amusing. Worse, it can sometimes completely mangle the communication.

I would guess that teaching the 3 Rs should be supplemented with "How to Learn," "How to research," and "How to troubleshoot". Unfortunately, I'm not certain that kids are quite up to those subjects in the early years. Research in cognition suggesting that certain concepts can only be mastered at a certain level of maturity, etc.

I will agree, though, that most of the knowledge I gained after the basics in elementary school has been long forgotten. Things I picked up in non-traditional study has been retained and expanded.

As you pointed out, people want to be able to measure to determine how changes are working. But, as we see often enough in software, what you measure determines how the system is optimized. If you measure rote memorization, the system emphasizes that.

Too bad true understanding is so hard to measure.