Starting in high school and spanning the rest of an individual’s life; a bizarre paradigm has permeated American culture. For the average student, high school is nothing short of a four-year sentence. In June of each year students are promoted a grade without having to demonstrate true mastery of any established standards. To make it from one year to the next, all one has to accomplish is avoidance of demonstrating shear incompetence. Promotion is based on not failing…rather than on the demonstration of mastery.

This strange arrangement persists throughout college. The degrees that adorn so many office walls are symbols of completion but truly only indicate that an individual spent four years of his or her life not failing at the coursework indicated by the calligraphic scrawl on the parchment.

The life of a computer programmer is about mastery. Programmers must never stop learning. The pace at which technologies are advancing and evolving make this an industry where failure to dedicate time and energy to the study and practice of emerging and developing standards constitutes professional suicide.

When a programmer's education begins is not as important as the fact that it never stops.

In reply to Re: Computer Education in Public Schools by insensate
in thread Computer Education in Public Schools by dystrophy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.