ARE YOU DESTROYING CHILDHOOD DREAMS BY CODING CHILDREN TO BECOME DIGITAL-WORMS ??

ARE YOU DESTROYING CHILDHOOD DREAMS BY CODING CHILDREN TO BECOME DIGITAL WORMS

Ramakant Tiwari  

 ( The views expressed are of the author and not of PF)

Wuhan virus has infected the whole world, economies have been decimated, all social equations are under an unprecedented turmoil, corporates have extensively gone for Work From Home/Work From Anywhere while school kids, Study At Home. As children are now gifted with ample spare time at home, entrepreneurs of various hues have been dishing out varieties of engagements for school children and one of them is coding.

Country has been raising a huge army of coders and programmers for two decades or so yet demand for more has been rising with increasing digitisation of all our existential activities. Pressure to expand teaching of coding had been growing and recent developments triggered by Wuhan-virus pandemic have accentuated the emphasis. Avarice for profit too has skyrocketed and businessmen have started harping on lowering age of coding learners even to the level of children attending elementary schools. Lobbying too has been undertaken to tweak school curriculum to include coding as a regular academic subject of teaching and learning. Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates too, threw his weight behind the idea as appetite for profit is an insatiable human instinct that recognises no limits or boundaries. He even proffered himself as a role-model who learned coding at the age of 13, missed regular education to become a billionaire geek incessantly counting his Dollars. Many other technology leaders too fell in line with the same view as confronting views of a tech-titan like Gates was profoundly a professional hazard as well as it was difficult to resist profits that were destined to fall in their balance sheets without their steely efforts. Some over-zealous among them wanted coding to be even ‘mother-tongue’ of younger generation !! Shops in the name of academies imparting lessons on coding work on ‘production-line’ concept practised in manufacturing industries have sprung up all over. They entice parents through aggressive marketing while plethora of unethical practices they encounter only after paying huge sums of their hard-earned money invariably non-refundable followed by harassment of parents and children. Such dubious ‘academies’ have also been claiming highly paid plush jobs with technology MNC giants. Parents do not challenge them as to how kids in the age-group of 6 to 15 can land with such jobs after completing their courses on coding sold by them. Even rebuttals to their tall claims are promptly withdrawn from social media sites at the behest of these unethical teaching shops masquerading as ‘teaching institutes’.   

Large number of parents are exceedingly ambitious for their young children so much so that they are falling into commercial traps presented before them in the guise of an ‘educational-innovative’. In the long run, it is destined to be disastrous for psychological health of children to say the least. Childhood-mind is highly impressionable, must be engaged in assimilating fundamental values of life, right Samskara-s, attaining a certain vision of future and dream about themselves. If children with such delicate minds are hustled into coding classes sitting before computer monitors for hours, they shall certainly come out as ‘Digital-worms’ (not even computer-nerds !!) at the expense of being vibrant, dynamic and autonomous personalities capable of tackling any crisis, calamity in their lives that may appear. This setback is monumental in dimensions if compared with loss of health, physical development through sports, exercises and Yoga. Body and mind, both shall be stunted vulnerable to a congeries of problems and health issues.

This article is not at all dedicated to the cause of denial of learning / teaching of coding to children. Coding may be taught as an optional subject in schools integrated to regular curriculum in a graded manner like all other subjects by school teachers. Pushing children into teaching shops to learn coding with Bill Gates as their role-model is simply regressive and debilitating to children’s normal development. Bill Gates explored and learned coding at his age of 13 as he belongs to a society wherein families do not exist, more that 50% children are born out of wedlock with no one to mentor them properly. This nation Bharata is a very different proposition wherein western influence cannot be replicated as it is. Every western concept of professionalism has to be re-visited, transformed and customised to suit our conditions and Samskritik values lest we move on the path of decline and self-destruction. Propaganda apparatus of western powers is so mighty that they project one-in-a-million billionaire as an ‘every household story of glory’ covering up their wretched underbelly to entice credulous gullibles in our country. 

By Ramakant Tiwari