Nope, but everyone doesn't need to be a mathematician, biologist, geologist, historian, or any of the other primary subjects in school either. I think that in 2015 it's hard to argue that a basic grasp of computers / software won't have at least as big of an effect on your quality of life after graduation as being able to work quadratic equations by hand, without reference.
I've personally been pretty irked by the whole "EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN TO CODE ASAP" narrative being pushed basically everywhere recently, but I agree with you here.
Sticking something like python onto the school curriculum would only be a good thing. The vast majority who do it won't become programmers, just as the vast majority who sit math don't become mathematicians, etc. but it would give kids a fun and interesting way to learn logic, create things on the computer for themselves, etc.
They have problems unique to them that they may be able to spin up little desktop apps or similar to solve, which could then go on to inspire them to become entrepreneurs, tech product creators, etc.
Regardless, there would be absolutely no harm in making it available to them.
I agree completely but, even with the glacial pace of true technical innovation I doubt that education can keep up with it.
I tend to believe we should scrap the idea of studying subjects, and go back to teaching how to think instead. In the information age, the subjects are easily accessible.
Focusing on the original Greek education of grammar, logic and rhetoric makes more sense to me today. I could see a limited subject study at the high school level, but overall I believe deciphering and processing information is far more important today than its ever been.
I'd love to have my kids focus on the trivium until high school, then move to a limited quadrivium of programming, math, history and biology at that point.
You mean "a very small subset of all books exist in the more expensive form of an audio book". Just check the library closest to you: 10000s of books, 100s of audio books.
Most official output from russia needs a really heavy filtering. But to use the word 'bandit state' - I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
To me, a bandit state echoes a temporary institution that is held up mostly through the use and threat of direct violence. To my eyes elements of the current status harken to a russian tzardom hundreds of years back.
Strong autocratic leaders have always been a part of the political apparatus and the fatalistic psyche of the population drive individuls to yield, survive and pour their energies to something else than politics. It is also notable that russia is a typical country suffering from the curse of oil which itself is empirically a really hard thing to avoid or heal from which twists the dynamics even further.
I would suggest three brief bodies of text to explore the problem of russia to those who are not familiar with them:
And thirdly, a bit longer work that reads like an autobiographic surrealist version of Catch-22, a description of the soviet system which trained most of those now in power (Suvorov:"Inside the soviet military"): http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/index.html
Dude, what Western people are completely missing, is that we're being bombarded with propaganda too! The Ukraine crisis starts and suddenly Russians turn out to be massive homophobes, huh?
Putin is evil and Obama is good, right? Nevermind that the US is still torturing people in the very Guantanamo Obama promised to close.
It's just not as simple as choosing to side with "the good guys" (=The West). In reality, it's a game of politicians vs us little folks, ie. rulers vs subjects.
> The Ukraine crisis starts and suddenly Russians turn out to be massive homophobes, huh?
Suddenly? They'd been widely criticized for their new homophobic laws well before the Ukraine crisis.
Also, the US torturing people doesn't make other atrocities okay. I keep hearing countries and their fanboys say "yeah, but that other country also does bad things", or "but China is even worse!" Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's okay for your country to do the same. It means that the other country should stop. Can we stop making this a race to the bottom?
> They'd been widely criticized for their new homophobic laws well before the Ukraine crisis.
I'm not so sure about that.
> Also, the US torturing people doesn't make other atrocities okay. I keep hearing countries and their fanboys say "yeah, but that other country also does bad things", or "but China is even worse!" Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's okay for your country to do the same.
I'm equally against all "countries" (=governments, in practice). You may have noticed they all do bad things, either currently or eventually.
It's easy to verify by looking up some dates. The law against homosexual propaganda stems from June 2013, and has been widely criticized ever since, including calls to boycott the Winter Olympics at Sochi, in February 2014. The protests that led to the Euromaidan revolution started in November 2013, the actual revolution took place in February 2014, and was soon followed by Russian intervention.
If you didn't start to pay attention to Russia until after the crisis started, I can imagine you might think the homophobia criticism came only after the crisis, but it actually started half a year earlier.
