Students to learn coding - rather than a foreign language
Politicians in Florida are set to vote on the proposal this week
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Politicians in Florida are poised to allow students to study computer coding rather than a foreign language.
Legislators in Tallahassee are set to vote on a proposal raised by a former Yahoo executive who believes students should be able to drop a traditional foreign language for coding, a language that many consider the lingua franca of the technology era.
Reports suggest that support for such a move is strong across the country. President Barack Obama recently called in a weekly radio address for computer science to join the “three Rs“ - reading, writing and arithmetic.
Officials in Kentucky, Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington also have floated the notion of substituting foreign language studies with computer coding credits in recent years, Reuters reported.
Democratic state Senator Jeremy Ring, who formerly worked for Yahoo, said his bill aimed to elevate computer science in Florida, where students mostly take the subject as an elective. Foreign languages are not required to earn a basic state diploma.
“Coding is a language,” said Mr Ring, who got the idea from his 14-year-old son. “It is a global language, more global than French or German or Spanish, or for that matter even English.”
Andrew Ladanowski and his son Jeremy are among those who support the measure.
“It’s very important for me and my son because my son has speech apraxia, so he has a difficulty pronouncing words, pronunciations, as well as a learning disability in respect to speech and language,” said Mr Ladanowski.
“He won’t have the time and energy to excel in the courses that he does. We’d like to maintain those As and Bs in the science, technology and mathematics and we worry that we spend all the time and resources trying to learn this foreign language that those grades will slip and the opportunity of going to college will be diminished.”
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments