I saw this video last year, but since it didn’t have Portuguese subtitles… I didn’t post it here.
However, even without subtitles, these ideas couldn’t be left without a brief comment.
Watch the video:

Douglas Rushkoff presents the importance of programming knowledge in modern times.
Not that he advocates for a world of programmers or addresses a specific programming language X or Y.
What’s fantastic about the video is the relationship between the invention of writing, programming, and modern media.
From the early sharing of knowledge through writing, books, and then with the modern printing press, he compares citizen access to each of these forms of transmitting knowledge. How that knowledge was controlled and distributed among common people and how society always lagged behind in new technologies for producing and distributing this same knowledge.

The question is really whether we’re falling behind by not including programming in our children’s world. Today, just as important as reading and writing, programming is necessary. From simple spreadsheets to complex systems, different levels of programming are used. Just as the invention of writing didn’t lead to a society of writers, as presented in the video, programming won’t create a society of programmers. The point is really having an idea of what can be programmed, having basic notions of how things work, and not just using tools as they’re given: Twitter, Facebook, Google, and even the web.

The video posted by Wilmara on Facebook caught my attention to the problem of education:

This made me think about why my children still ask what language is spoken in such-and-such a country… with Wikipedia and Google available. They know how to access Facebook, games, and mainly YouTube. But they don’t have the capacity for synthesis, which isn’t taught in school. We continue to teach memorization, repetition, and decoration. I remember when I spent so much time finding the scientific name of 10 animals back in elementary school… today that would be done in seconds!

The focus remains: reading, memorizing, repeating. I was confronted with this reality in my first job as a programming logic teacher. My students were around 15 years old, and I was just 18 when we started working on simple math problems like percentages and proportions. The house came crashing down. This was strange because I was teaching at an elite school where you had to pass a competitive exam to attend. They weren’t bad or struggling students; they were above average! Some of them had difficulty using the knowledge they’d learned through calculation exercises in a new reality. They could calculate, but not apply what they knew to solve similar problems in different contexts. It was simply developing their equations, writing new problem statements, applying what they already knew – the opposite of how they’d been prepared throughout their lives!

Drawing parallels: Should we instead teach our children to create their own videos on YouTube? To write correctly or at least try to write correctly using wikis and even creating their own homepages? Here, we’re talking about programming in a broader sense – mastering the tools we use. I’m not an artist, but I received basic art lessons in school… and I still know how to combine colors, although I don’t know how to draw or paint. We need to teach our children to master new media. Not to create a society of programmers, but to avoid having them consume knowledge without understanding how it’s produced, stored, made available, and controlled.

Bonus video:

Only at OR Books: Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff from OR Books on Vimeo.