“Besides being a hard skill, that employers actually want, coding. helps build soft skills. Coding promotes the use of logic, reasoning, problem solving and creativity,”
Students already take four years of mathematics that build the same skills in similar ways. And really, these are skills you should also be practicing in history, social studies, and every other class.
I'm not crazy about the math curriculum, and in fact I'd be all for replacing some of the math with programming. But foreign languages are incredibly useful, in ways not taught in other classes.
Not only does it help you deal with an increasingly globalized world, Spanish in particular is incredibly useful here in the US. It gives you perspective that no other classes teach, both in culture and in language itself.
There are a number of concepts in English that are hard to teach within English itself because you do them natively. We switch between tenses, aspects, and moods so easily we don't realize we do it. This improves writing and communication even if you never speak that language after graduating. It's a lot like that first semester of geometry, where you're doing proofs of "obvious" things just to learn what a proof actually means.
A lot of colleges want to see foreign language experience, in every department. And employers want to see that college degree, even for programmers (different rant).
I'm all for more programming. It really is the best profession and a good skill even if you don't practice it professionally. Any STEM field must learn it. But programming is job involving humans as well as computers, from documentation to UX to requirements gathering. Developing those "soft skills" is more important than people like to admit, and foreign language is a really useful way to learn it.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 12.4 ms ] threadStudents already take four years of mathematics that build the same skills in similar ways. And really, these are skills you should also be practicing in history, social studies, and every other class.
I'm not crazy about the math curriculum, and in fact I'd be all for replacing some of the math with programming. But foreign languages are incredibly useful, in ways not taught in other classes.
Not only does it help you deal with an increasingly globalized world, Spanish in particular is incredibly useful here in the US. It gives you perspective that no other classes teach, both in culture and in language itself.
There are a number of concepts in English that are hard to teach within English itself because you do them natively. We switch between tenses, aspects, and moods so easily we don't realize we do it. This improves writing and communication even if you never speak that language after graduating. It's a lot like that first semester of geometry, where you're doing proofs of "obvious" things just to learn what a proof actually means.
A lot of colleges want to see foreign language experience, in every department. And employers want to see that college degree, even for programmers (different rant).
I'm all for more programming. It really is the best profession and a good skill even if you don't practice it professionally. Any STEM field must learn it. But programming is job involving humans as well as computers, from documentation to UX to requirements gathering. Developing those "soft skills" is more important than people like to admit, and foreign language is a really useful way to learn it.