Teaching coding to school students has won some pretty heavyweight supporters over the past couple of weeks. Bill Shorten, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott now all think students from primary school upwards should be taught to code – getting little fingers busy with C++ or Python is becoming something of a political cause celebre in Australia. But as always, it’s worth a pause to think before taking a large gulp of the Kool-Aid.
“Coding is the literacy of the 21st century,” Shorten said in his budget reply speech. Malcolm Turnbull, not to be outdone, the next day said: “If we want to succeed, and continue to succeed as a prosperous first-world economy … the key tool for that is coding.”
And now Tony Abbott, despite ridiculing the idea at first (“Does he want to send them all out to work at the age of 11?” he asked), has jumped on the coding bandwagon.