Coding in National Schools Isn't a Good Idea

See, kids? Coding is fun!

The Minister for Education, Richard Bruton, has written to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to request that the NCCA consider the teaching of coding in national schools. This is a bad idea, for three reasons.

The Basis of Coding is Already on the Curriculum
The basis of coding is already on the curriculum. It is called “maths.” Maths and coding go hand-in-hand. If you can do one, you can do the other. Both work on the notion of orderly thinking. If this, then that. It is possible for a talented coder to have been poor at maths in school but that coder’s mind for maths will have clicked just when the coding clicked for him or her. The two are intertwined like Maguire and Patterson.

Sadly, we teach maths the same way we do most other things – arseways. OECD studies regularly show that Irish standards of literacy and numeracy are consistently poor. The Irish Times reported at the start of the year that Ireland ranked 18th of 23 countries in literacy, and 21st out of 23 in numeracy, among 16- to 19- year-olds. It also reported “about one in five university graduates can manage basic literacy and numeracy tasks – such as understanding the instructions on a bottle of aspirin – but struggle with more complex tasks.” University students.

These are terrifying figures. The OECD reports can be behind the curve timewise, and advocates of Project Maths will claim that once that initiative kicks in the results will go right up. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Project Maths course simply adds another layer of confusion to a subject that is intimidating to begin with. It’s a grim prospect.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All
The only way a minister could dream of better publicity than talking about this strange thing, ‘coding,’ would be if he or she were to announce that the DoE were bringing in some specialists from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as consultants to discuss adding transfiguration, charms and potions to the curriculum. Coder is the astronaut job of our times, the job that is done by pioneers who create the future.

But reader, a job market where the jobs are made up entirely of coders – or astronauts, or witches and wizards, for that matter – is not exactly ready to survive in the choppy seas of Ireland’s open economy. How many coders do we need per head of population? Probably not as many as we need nurses, or doctors, or teachers, or shopkeepers, or a thousand and one other jobs that are just as relevant if not quite as buzzy.

Short-Term Populism is the Curse of Irish Politics
Why, then, with a need for diverse skills in an open economy, with basic literacy and numeracy red-letter issues in education, to say nothing of dealing with eternally bolshy teachers’ unions and getting teachers trained as coders, did the Minister write this letter to the NCCA? It is impossible to look into another man’s heart but the politician’s eternal quest for good publicity is a reasonable assumption.

Twenty-five years ago, gay marriage was a taboo subject. Now, Irish politicians are tearing the backs of each other trying to photographed having a pint in the Pantibar. Is this because a wave of social liberalism has swept through Leinster House? Or is it because every politician knows this is guaranteed good, criticism-free publicity and you can’t have too much of that?

The success of the coder dojo, a movement that introduces children to coding at an early age, has been mentioned as a reason for coding to be introduced at a more general level in primary schools. But a certain amount of – delicious irony! – what statisticians call “response bias” is at work there. The children who are doing well at coder dojos are the children who would do well at pretty much any academic subject, and who enjoy the priceless support of a home environment that encourages that sort of endeavour. The OECD stats suggest that such an environment is sadly atypical of the nation’s children in general.

But what difference do facts about literacy and numeracy gaps, diverse talents in a diverse economy or response bias make to a politician who wants to get in the papers? None at all. He or she is certainly due for claps on the back the next time he or she is out on the town, because politicians typically socialise with people who send their children to coder dojos, and ballet, and hockey, and the Gaeltacht. These people are also those who write for and edit newspapers, so it’s winner all round. And when the thing grinds to a halt, what odds? It'll be some other minister’s problem by then.

Destructive Love and the First Language

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Psychologists call it destructive love. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. The poor lonely singer in Love is Pleasing, who left her friends and her own religion, she left them all for to follow him.

All of these great doomed loves pale to nothing compared to the hopeless of the Gaeilgeoir’s love for Gaeilge, the ancient language of the Gael. It came to mind last week, while reading an online discussion about the new postcodes.

Someone remarked that maybe the postcodes would allow letters addressed in the first language to be delivered a little bit livelier than they are currently. Someone else wondered if the anyone addressing letters in the first language wasn’t just being a little awkward, and would they not just stop showing off and cut out the nonsense.

At this stage, people licked their lips and waited for the fur to fly, because suggesting to Gaeilgeoirí that insisting on using Irish is just being awkward is like going into the toughest bar in town and ordering a pint of milk. It’s shillelagh time.

In this case, the Gaeilgeoir didn’t rise to the bait. What would be the point? In all our hearts, we know the battle is being lost. It’s visible from all points.

The state was founded on poets’ dreams. Not quite as substantial a foundation as considerable riches in natural resources or harbours vital to international seaways. One of the poets’ dreams was that everyone on the island would be speaking Irish within a generation. The superior culture would wash east from the Gaeltacht and swept the inferior culture of the oppressor into the Irish Sea, where it belonged. Darwinism at its finest.

Well, that didn’t happen. The Gaeltacht is still considered the one true well of Irish linguistic purity, but the reality is the last person to only speak Irish lived, died and was buried long ago. The language is laid out like Tim Finnegan at his famous wake, with a copy of Dineen’s Dictionary at her feet and a DVD of TG4’s Laochra Gael at her head.

Every time that different Governments tried something new to save the language, their plans blew up in their face. Attempts to standardize the language were dismissed as “Civil Service Irish.”

The spelling of the language was modernized, making books printed in the 1920s and 30s, when the fire burned brightly among Gaels, very difficult to read now. And the project failed to be consistent in its revisions, leaving the orthography of Irish broken in bits, having fallen between two schools.

Compulsory Irish was the way to go in the early days of the State. In the 1960s, opinions had changed, and compulsory Irish was seen as killing the language through coercion. So compulsory Irish was done away with, and the decline accelerated instead of slowing down. Damned if they did, damned if they didn’t.

The language struggles to keep up with the modern world – how could it not? An Béal Beo, written by Tomás Ó Máille and first published in 1936, is still in print today and is regarded as one of the great works of scholarship in the language. But the words and phrases Ó Máille records describe the lifestyle of a very different people in a very different Ireland to today’s.

Just looking through the chapter titles emphasises the changes – chapter six has words for turf and the bog, chapter seven deals with the fair, chapter nine looks at seol an fhíadóra, the weaver’s loom.

And then, of course, when all hope is lost, it happens. You hear her voice in the last place you were expecting, and you forget everything negative that’s gone before. You are hers and she is yours and you will love your own language until the end of time for one or both of you.

For instance: you may wish to install a thing called Linux on your computer, in the hopes of keeping up with the modern world. During the installation, you will given a choice of language options, and you get a shock when you see that those options include Irish.

Linux is open-source code. That means it’s free to use, but it also means it must be written for love, not money. Nobody gets paid for writing open-source code – how could they? If it’s given away for free, how could anyone get paid to write it?

But people write it anyway, out of love. Love of different things – computers, obviously, but also love of a certain vision of humanity, where everybody works together for the common good, because it’s the right thing to do.

And in the midst of all these pale but noble souls there was at least one, but probably a few, Gaeilgeoirí. Every day they come in, open up their machines and open up Linux, looking for the tables where the language labels are stored.

All the usual suspects are in all the usual places –haughty France, fiery Spain, world-conquering England – all the great countries of the world are represented by their own languages. And then the pale and noble souls would get typing and clicking and saving, so as to make sure that the strange, throaty, hardsoft, staccato-sibilant language clinging to life on a small island on the western edge of Europe could take her place with the best of them in the shiny halls of cyberspace.

Some Gaelgeoirí like to believe that Gaeilge captures something of the Irish soul that is untranslatable, that can only be understood by those who think in Irish. The language’s enemies say that even if that were true, that day is long past.

But maybe the way that the language has managed to survive for all these years, is reflective of the Irish themselves. That our language’s dogged survival mirrors the Irish nation’s no less dogged survival.

An island people, stubborn, quixotic, inconsistent and, in many ways, much better off they’d give up the struggle and just be like everyone else. But damned if they want to be like everyone else, and so we march on into the future just the same. Nár lagaí Dia ceachtar acu.

The Alphabet Soup of Modern Technology

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Just when you thought it was safe to watch the news now that the Troika have packed their trunks and said goodbye to the circus, along comes this bugging thing. It’s gone to an inquiry so we’re unlikely to hear any more about it until that report is due, but in the meantime the innocent nation has once more been traumatised by having to listen to people pontificate on the airwaves despite the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about. Not a notion.

Remember the guy who used to stand up on the bus and confess that he didn’t know what a tracker mortgage was? This past fortnight could have done with someone standing up and confessing that he or she hadn’t a breeze what a wifi network is, to say nothing about IMSI-catchers and all that James Bond stuff.

It’s alphabet soup. The telecoms industry is a holy terror for acronyms. In one way, it’s not entirely their fault, as the rate of technological progress has been so fast in the past thirty years that you’ve only invented one thing when some other pointy-head has gone and invented something else that makes your invention as useful as a butter-churn and you’re back to Square One again. When the race is being run at that speed, the technicians aren’t going to waste much time wondering if Joe Public can keep up.

Which is hard luck on Joe Public, of course. Joe Public is an easy-going sort of a fella, doesn’t like to make much fuss, likes his pint and football on telly. But the pace of the world is getting a bit hectic for Joe Public and he has to keep up with technology, even if he doesn’t want to. The whole world is wired now, and we have to make our way among the cables, whether we like it or not.

It was hard not to feel a little sorry for a prominent journalist last week who make a terrible fool of himself by trying to talk about technology that he doesn’t understand. The technology isn’t easy to understand and even those that can understand it aren’t always great at getting it across.

For instance: there was a story that briefly appeared a little before Christmas about cyber-security flaws in ten Irish hotels discovered by a vigilant IT company. So naturally people are scared and worry about their online security because they don’t know what’s going on.

People like to use hotel wifi when they’re on holidays because data roaming charges will hang you high but you’d still like to check Facebook or Twitter of an evening. But how can you use hotel wifi if it’s not secure? The company that did the survey said that hackers could find out everything bar the colour of your underpants, and that too if you’d been foolish enough to buy them online.

So you’re nervous having ready this story about cyber-security. You go online then before you go abroad to find out if hotel wifi is secure and you’re worse off than you ever were. One innocent asked a question about hotel wifi on one of the internet’s less forgiving technology forums only to be dismissively told that really, all things considered, you should only use public wifi through a VPN.

So you can imagine how much better the innocent felt after that. If he or she was unsure about hotel wifi he or she is hardly able to tell a VPN from the ICA. Thanks for nothing, fellas.

Someone sent a tweet last week of a story in a British newspaper saying that Germany was unhappy with wifi security standards, and advised people to stick with the good old cables, with which you always know where you stand. Thing is, that story was from 2007. In online terms, 2007 is old Methuselah’s time. It’s like warning people not to go to sea because of the dragons.

The most important thing to remember in trying to figure out new technology and security issues is this: There’s a considerable difference between what’s possible and what’s probable.

Is it possible to hack your Facebook account when you’re holidaying at the Hotel Splendide in Cannes? Yes, it surely is. But it would take a hacker of very considerable skills to do it and chances are you’re really not worth it.

Does that mean you can’t be hacked? No, it doesn’t mean that either. When you’re online, it’s a lot like parking your car. If you leave the doors open while you’re doing your shopping, there’s a good chance some gouger will drive off with the thing.

So be sensible. Choose strong passwords. If you’re asked to sign up to something too good to be true, don’t. There’s nothing that’s too good to be true. Use mainstream sites like Amazon or Google. Look out for web addresses that begin with https, rather than just http – it means there’s an extra layer of security. Just use the head and you’ll be fine.

Alphabet Soup: Wifi is the technology that takes you online when you don’t have a cable to plug into your machine. It was quite insecure when it started, but not so much anymore. The Hotel Splendide’s wifi is more than likely top notch. The wifi at that bar down by the docks, frequented by all those sailors with scars on the faces from bottle fights? Probably best wait ‘til you get back to the hotel.

Every phone has an IMSI – it’s an International Mobile Subscriber Identity, a means of letting the network know that you are really you. An IMSI-catcher, however, is a way of stealing your identity on the mobile networks, and they are not at all common because if they were, it’s the end of mobile industry.

Finally, a VPN is a Virtual Private Network. If you’re not planning to infringe someone’s copyright or get up to other online mischief, you’ll be fine without one. Just fine.