<story><title>Teach kids to farm, not code.</title><url>http://kimburgess.info/thoughts/teach-kids-to-farm-not-code</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gambiting</author><text>I don&apos;t understand.
We&apos;ve spent thousands of years, using 99.9% of able-bodied people for farming, hunting or some other food-gathering activities. Only selected few could afford to NOT work in farming.
Even America, just 200 years ago had 90% of its population working as farmers.&lt;p&gt;Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Sure, the food industry is not always honest,not always as good as your own home-grown food, but still - it allowed us to do something else with our lives, and pushed our societies an order of magnitude ahead.&lt;p&gt;As much as people should APPRECIATE farming, I don&apos;t think that everyone should do it. We produce enough food as it is.
We should teach kids how to code however, not because we need more programmers(which we do,but I digress) - but because it&apos;s the easiest way to introduce kids to logical, technical-like thinking. That way we can have more mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, engineers - people who we can afford to keep alive(almost literally) because they do not need to grown their own food anymore! They can sit at their desks for the whole day, thinking how to make the world better, instead of looking at how the crops grow.&lt;p&gt;I would say - why not give kids both? Is it too much to ask? Show them how vegetables are grown, how animals are cared for and how are they slaughtered, but at the same time, yes, please teach them how to code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aethertap</author><text>I run a small farm, and I&apos;ve been a professional programmer for about 12 years.  I agree with what you say - kids should definitely have the opportunity to learn both.  Of my two pursuits above, farming is much newer to me and I&apos;ve found an amazing amount of skill transfer from the world of programming to the world of farming.  Granted, my sheep don&apos;t understand when I yell at them in haskell, but the approaches to problem solving, whole-system thinking, and consideration of edge cases I think are enormously beneficial in almost any profession.&lt;p&gt;I do think that today&apos;s kids would benefit not only from knowing a thing or two about how to raise some food (&lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; different from actual &quot;farming&quot;) and also from having much more contact with the natural world.&lt;p&gt;I also think that many kids would benefit from learning the &quot;art&quot; side of programming - the stuff that&apos;s fun and interesting, like solving puzzles, appreciation of the hard-to-define idea of elegance, reverse engineering, etc.  Nothing else I&apos;ve learned to do has had quite the impact on my ability to consider many angles in a situation and reason a way to get from one state to another, and at least for me it&apos;s been a fun process to learn it all.&lt;p&gt;My real complaint when anybody says &quot;Everybody should have to learn X,&quot; is that I think it should be &quot;Everybody should have &lt;i&gt;a chance&lt;/i&gt; to learn X.&quot;  Coding was the best path for me to learn to think about complex, abstract things and apply that thinking to the real world (including farming).  For others, it may not be so.</text></comment>
<story><title>Teach kids to farm, not code.</title><url>http://kimburgess.info/thoughts/teach-kids-to-farm-not-code</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gambiting</author><text>I don&apos;t understand.
We&apos;ve spent thousands of years, using 99.9% of able-bodied people for farming, hunting or some other food-gathering activities. Only selected few could afford to NOT work in farming.
Even America, just 200 years ago had 90% of its population working as farmers.&lt;p&gt;Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? Sure, the food industry is not always honest,not always as good as your own home-grown food, but still - it allowed us to do something else with our lives, and pushed our societies an order of magnitude ahead.&lt;p&gt;As much as people should APPRECIATE farming, I don&apos;t think that everyone should do it. We produce enough food as it is.
We should teach kids how to code however, not because we need more programmers(which we do,but I digress) - but because it&apos;s the easiest way to introduce kids to logical, technical-like thinking. That way we can have more mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, engineers - people who we can afford to keep alive(almost literally) because they do not need to grown their own food anymore! They can sit at their desks for the whole day, thinking how to make the world better, instead of looking at how the crops grow.&lt;p&gt;I would say - why not give kids both? Is it too much to ask? Show them how vegetables are grown, how animals are cared for and how are they slaughtered, but at the same time, yes, please teach them how to code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Turing_Machine</author><text>&quot;Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again? &quot;&lt;p&gt;Because most of them have no idea just how grim the life of a subsistence peasant farmer really is, and how that differs from the lucky few who get to sell boutique &quot;organic&quot; produce to rich people.</text></comment>