ExtraTorrent | Kentucky Set Computer Skills Equal to Foreign Languages

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The Kentucky Senate has recently delivered an interesting decision: all students in the state are now allowed to replace foreign language requirements in public schools with computer programming courses. The idea is to help prepare teenagers for high-paying jobs in the computer industry. Today Kentucky students must earn 22 credits to graduate high school, but 15 of them are requirements for maths, science, social studies and English, while college prerequisites call on kids to have 2 credits of foreign language.

The creators of the new bill want colleges to count computer languages a “foreign language”. They point at national statistics indicating that no more than 2.4% of college students graduate with a degree in computer science, while there is a high demand of it in the world. Students who are good in programming can consider jobs that start with $60,000 salaries.

Of course, there’s opposition to this suggestion, because it can re-enforce the isolationist nature of education. Apparently, some believe that if Kentuckians teenagers can’t speak French or German they can forget where these countries are and speak Java instead.