States are considering saying “Adiós Español,” “Au Revoir Français,” “Gàobié Zhōngguó,” and introducing students to C++, JavaScript, and Python.
According to The Christian Science Monitor, Florida State Senator Jeremy Ring (D), a former Yahoo! Executive turned politician, has proposed a bill to allow students in the Sunshine State to drop traditional foreign languages in exchange for coding.
“This is a global language today,” said Ring at a hearing on February 3. “Computers and programming have become part of our global culture.”
Enrollment in most traditional foreign language education in Spanish, French, Arabic, and Japanese have been on the decline in the U.S. since 2013 and course change could give students a much needed advantage in the workforce.
“You can translate languages across the Internet through coding, but you can’t do that without coding,” Brooke Stewart, a 16-year-old sophomore in Tampa, told Reuters, who said that she would much prefer learning coding because she enjoys designing computer games.
Democrats in the state legislature and multiculturalists who want leave students in the past are demanding it is more important that children — especially the children of immigrants — learn their parents native tongue, rather than get a job in the future.
“Spanish is used to communicate to one another,” Cameron Wilson, vice president of government affairs at CODE.org said to Reuters. “A computer language is really only used to communicate to a computer on how to execute codes on a machine.”
The state senator is unwavering in his support for the bill, saying that this is the future whether people like it or not.
Florida isn’t alone in this effort for students to pick up the language of the future. Elected officials in Kentucky, Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington have made similar proposals.
Texas made the foreignlanguage for computer coding exchange back in 2014 according to Education Week.
“There’s no question in my mind that computer language is the great equalizer,” Ring said in December. “We can be the first state in America to do this, or we can be the 50th state in America to do this, it’s gonna happen.”
