The argument against children learning to code

Chennai

I am a parent, and this is my little mutiny. I withdrew my 5-year-old daughter, Vaidehi, from her school in this northern India city. The school had 110 students joining each online class, all of them instructed to be in their school uniforms. India has about 10 million coronavirus cases now, and schools have been offering online instruction since March.

Taking my daughter out of our city’s most sought-after school for girls came some months after a moment that became a turning point. Vaidehi’s teacher had sent us a note saying: “The parents need to pay more attention at home and work with her. Vaidehi drew a giraffe in her art class that was multicoloured.”

My daughter has been a storyteller on YouTube since she was 3. She talks to Chanda the cow and Rambo the calf at our village home; she loves to wrestle in the mud and soak in the rain. I increasingly felt that the teachers were not recognizing children for their unique capabilities but were trying to turn them into clones of one another.

After the outbreak of the coronavirus, her school went online in March and a faceless screen rose between Vaidehi and her classmates. Around then, unknown to my little daughter, Karan Bajaj, an Indian entrepreneur, signed a $300 million deal to sell his company WhiteHat Jr. to Byju’s, the world’s largest educational tech company.

WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families. WhiteHat Jr. was forced to take down five of its advertisements after the Advertising Standards Council of India, a self-regulatory body, found them in potential violation of its code.

But the campaigns continue. Hrithik Roshan, one of the most prominent Bollywood actors and the father of two boys, endorsed the brand in a television campaign, where he was anxious about the utility of the skills Indian children are learning today and saw hope and promise for their future in learning coding on WhiteHat Jr.

Although numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a parent’s deepest fear: Will my child be left behind?

In the world that millions of parents want for their children, a giraffe could well be multicoloured. At her new school, Vaidehi’s screen time is substantially reduced. When she joins online, she loves telling stories to her class, singing songs with the other kids, learning how to dance even if she follows the teacher’s steps only onscreen. I see a remarkable change in her just because she can be herself.

I realize that our world is about to change unrecognisably. Robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality shall soon be concepts and a way of living that will be second nature to our children. The future should excite us, not make our children feel afraid and ill equipped. The future should — and I am sure will — have a place for dreamers and doers, and not just those hunched forever over a computer.

I want my little daughter to grow up in a world where her brain can evolve not only if she knows how to code, but because she can still play with Chanda the cow and Rambo the calf, wrestle in mud and soak in rain, and question the sauntering millipede. Yes, a giraffe can be multicoloured.

Misra is a writer and audio storyteller based out of Lucknow. NYT©2020

The New York Times