> What makes you think this one would be any different?

Because unlike almost all other classes, that one would be immediately beneficial in daily life, in a direct and apparent way.

No it won't, unless we build infrastructure for them to work with.

Even worse, given modern security standards, I wouldn't be surprised if programming and scripting were to be prohibited in the next ten years or so.

It seems like a negative feedback loop or something, nobody uses these sorts of features, so nobody implements them, and then the skills are less useful…

Microsoft Excel (or cloud-based spreadsheets) will always be allowed. Even if they remove scripting abilities, a clever person can remove a lot of office busy work with just basic Excel functionalities like pivot tables.

Basic scripting abilities would be beneficial years later for the subset of the kids who become office drones.

I would agree with your assessment about 'immediately beneficial in daily life', if you were talking about a course offered to adults who are already working a white collar job.

Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard.

And most people can do basic arithmetic, right?

The goal, I think, to start should be to get to the point where an office of 10 or so people has at least one or two who can string together basic scripts.

> Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard.

'Post hoc ergo propter hoc.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

By and large, kids from well-off parents were always more literate, and they still are. And the US is a lot richer now than it used to be.

So your reasoning is "elites have always been more educated then average, so standard education cannot have had an effect in average literacy"? It is far more reasonable (and verifiable) to conclude that widespread standard education is more than just correlated with higher average rates of literacy.

Byran Caplan's Case Against Education might be a good place to start. The author has collected a lot of statistics.

For the second time in as many days, I find myself saying on HN: your argument only makes sense if you reduce all societal logic to economic logic. What a way to live.

If schools aren’t even teaching basic things like arithmetic and literacy, then what are they? Just a place to park kids while their parents work? In that case, might as well also do some programming classes, right? If the other option is learning nothing.

I mean, if you want to totally revamp the education system, I’m here for it, but I guess that seems like a bigger project to me.

Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education might be a good place to start, if you want to have a broader discussion about the education system.

And yes, baby sitting is a big part of the package that schools do provide in practice.

> In that case, might as well also do some programming classes, right?

I don't think programming classes would do any more damage than the current curriculum.

> If the other option is learning nothing.

Well, giving the kids free time or more physical activity might also be useful?

Add it to reach the average-smart kids, those without internal knowledge of where to look or internal motivation to learn (but still will take the advanced classes for a grade).