The code to losing one's job?

As you read this post, chances are good that you will think this: No wonder this guy is about to be fired from his job!

If you don't think that, well, then you are as much as "loser" as I am, and you need to be worried about your job too ;)

My first day at the university where I have been teaching for 19 years, I met others who were also joining that same year.  One of them, about my age, was a physicist, with what seemed like an intense New York way of speaking.  When talking with him, I found out that he was the physics department--there was no other physics faculty at the university.  I was shocked, of course, especially when that was my first ever intellectual love.

At small universities like ours, physics is not one that we care to educate students about.  For that matter, even at big time universities, physics does not attract students.  As with many aspects of higher education, this too is something that disappoints and depresses me.  Whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of exploration of ideas in a liberal education setting?

We have moved far, far away from exploration.  The excitement that we could be exploring the universe forever apparently is not easy to monetize within a few years; ergo, those are not worth studying!  Despite the number of studies about the benefits and tangible returns over the long-term, people are obsessed with short-term ROI.

This approach is rapidly filtering down to the high school level where, for instance, even learning a foreign language is now considered to be wasteful compared to learning a programming language! 

Should we wonder then that right from when they are kids, there is a push to teach them how to code! Yes, kids are being pushed to code!

WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families.

How terrible!

Hrithik Roshan, one of the most prominent Bollywood actors and the father of two boys, endorsed the brand in a television campaign, where he was anxious about the utility of the skills Indian children are learning today and saw hope and promise for their future in learning coding on WhiteHat Jr.

Although numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a parent’s deepest fear: Will my child be left behind?

Fire me already for I am simply unfit for this new world :(

Such a contemporary approach to education and knowing, and the push for specialization in order to "grow the economy," cannot possibly help us in the long-run.    Buckminster Fuller said it best:

Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

Right from when we are kids, we need to understand how we relate to other humans, to other life forms, to rocks and rivers, and to outer space.  But, we cannot expect all these to miraculously happen if we take away exploration from education.  With a singular focus on various aspects of computing, we are only educating to create a society of automatons!