By Diana Moya Lapeira

“Make kids refrigerator-ready. Make kids fax machine-ready.” If those phrases sound strange, according to Natasha Singer, that’s the point.

On Oct. 20, students and professionals gathered for a Human-Computer Interaction Seminar at the Stata Center, where New York Times reporter Natasha Singer discussed her book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools. Her recent book focuses on how big tech has gained more power in public schools than any other industry. 

The jobs promise

The push to teach coding in public schools was rooted in the promise of high-paying tech jobs. The central example in Singer’s book is CodeAI (formerly Code.org), whose viral 2013 launch video framed coding as a path to high-paying jobs or building fast-growing startups. Singer criticized this focus on becoming a founder as “a very builder-centric vision of computer science, not an analytical vision.” While these efforts made computer science education more accessible, the tech industry’s values of speed, scale, and efficiency often don’t mesh with what works in education.

Some educators believe that, despite the messaging of companies like CodeAI, computer science education serves a purpose outside of building for industry. Mitchel Resnick, PhD ‘92, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab and leader of the research group that developed the MIT block-coding platform Scratch, said jobs aren’t the main reason he wants kids to learn to code. Instead, he sees it as “more like learning to write.” Most people who learn to write don’t become novelists or journalists, Resnick explained, but they gain a way to express their ideas. 

Resnick wants technology to be used for “projects, passion, peers, and play,” using code as a means to explore things they care about. In a podcast interview with Singer, Resnick pointed out how schools teach kids to recognize propaganda in writing but also to write their own stories, and that computer science education could do the same. Singer made a similar comparison, likening teaching computer science to teaching government civics, which is not only about government but also about the individual’s power and rights.