Why we shouldn't be teaching kids to code

I see a lot of articles lamenting that lack of kids learning to write code. Especially girls. I see a lot of articles talking about why and how we should be teaching kids to code.

Teaching kids to code, especially primary aged kids, is a waste of their time, and taxpayer dollars

We do not need to teach kids to code. We need to teach kids to think. We need to teach these kids philosophy.

Some people lament the outcomes of 2016. Brexit, Trump, whatever you think about these events, it's clear that many people on either side of the debate did not have basic critical thinking skills, like those I learnt in entry level philosophy.

I wasn't really taught to think critically in school. My kids are not being taught to think critically in school. All our exams are based on kids spouting the right answers. Some will reward kids for showing their thinking. But none reward kids for thinking critically.

It has been shown that teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in maths and English. Being better at maths and English will certainly help them be better coders at some point in the future. If that's what they want to do.

Some schools are starting to pick this up. But the current drive from the government in my country, and in many other countries, is to ignore the benefits of teaching kids how to think. Our current Minister of Finance, when he was Minister of Tertiary Education wrote an article about "skilling our future". Apart from the obvious grammatical problems with using a noun as a verb, this article is focusing on the wrong things.

The programming languages I learnt 15 years ago are virtually useless to me now. The programming languages you teach kids are likely to be archaic and pointless by the time they graduate in 10 to 18 years. But if you teach them how to think, how to learn, how to pick up new skills, how to use knowledge and skills they already know to understand domains that are new to them, you're really helping them. Then you are setting them up for life in a world that will, most likely, be fundamentally different by the time they enter the work force.

The whining I hear from tech employers about how school and university graduates aren't skilled for the workforce is both counter productive and pointless. Universities and schools are not skills factories turning out coding widgets for an industrial market place and we shouldn't be expecting them to be.

Universities and schools should be knowledge academies that teach people to think and learn. Employers need to own their responsibility to their own industry to help people gain the skills they need. What they should be asking for is people who can really think.

People who can think, and in doing so innovate, learn new domains and skills, and drive a knowledge economy. These are the people we need. They are more valuable that a person who can write Javascript but has no clue about how to filter information and learn new domains and skills.

Lets quit focusing on short term needs when it comes to education. We need to take the long view.

How do we prepare the next generations to engage with a world that will be fundamentally different to the one they were educated in?

Edit: I clarified my statement about the outcomes of 2016 to highlight that critical thinking skills were missing on both sides of the debate.