However, there is a lot of middle ground between “can’t program” and “professional software engineer”, and I think we can aim at least somewhere in the middle. After all, we expect everyone in public education to learn the basics of both writing prose and comprehending mechanical physics (gears, levers, force, etc).* So no matter whether we fall back on a media or engineering analogy, there is precedent to suggest moving basic computer literacy into a middle ground where you can understand enough to write/engineer a simple program and be able to appreciate what goes into creating a larger one.

I think a big step in the right direction would be providing educators with highly accessible (but powerful) coding tools and languages. They’re already out there in the wild, but I know around here the high school “computer studies” curriculum basically amounts to the teacher using whatever they happen to be familiar with. So teachers who try to make programming mandatory but are using cluttered, professional-targeted IDEs such as Visual Studio, and languages such as C# / Java which force you to leap headlong into OOP code just to make “Hello World” run, end up scaring away students and the course program falters. Options such as Processing don’t even make a blip on their radar because no one is actively making them known on a curriculum level.

*heck, here in B.C. they’re moving electrical circuit calculations such as finding the equivalent resistance of a set of parallel resistors into the grade 9 science curriculum. We’re already pretty much expecting students to understand the basic principles behind how a TV set works!

A question though – do you mean that you want everyone to understand what a computer can do? Or are you happy just for that skill to receive proper recognition?