aeh makes an excellent point about the importance of defining what constitutes "an educated citizen".
As a secondary consideration, we then also have to overlay the lens of rewards to the individual vs rewards to society, if we want to create an accurate benefit-cost understanding. After all, *who* pays and *who* benefits is material in the calculus. I'll lay that aside for now, though.
I have my own views on this. I quite like aeh's working definition, so I'm quoting it below, but feel free to throw in whatever amendments you like. Part of the challenge in this discussion lies in the fact that we are inferring skills from credentials, which may not be valid. What I like about aeh's definition is that it speaks to behaviours, which arise from skills.
mature adults who are able to think objectively and rationally about their own and other's ideas and actions, to take alternate perspectives, to disagree without being disagreeable, and otherwise to engage in civil discourse
My questions for the group, if people are interested, would be:
1/ What share of liberal arts university grads actually meet these criteria? That would speak to the effectiveness of the current system of general PSE education.
2/ To what extent are these skills currently fostered in publicly-funded K-12 education? PISA scores give us some clue as to current PSE readiness, if we want to use that as a proxy for potential for adult level mastery, blunt measure that it is.
3/ How could programming be amended in K-12 to enhance student acquisition of these skills?
My thoughts:
Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of the catch-all "educated citizen" concept - it's too amorphous to measure and enact. Really, effective thinking and citizenship distills into a constellation of presumably teachable skills. Otherwise, we're aiming at ether.
We can think of "educated citizenry" as existing on a continuum. K-12 education allows the student to achieve X% of the target adult score. There's probably some minimally sufficient level of education that enables citizens to participate meaningfully in society, make informed decisions as voters that supports the well-being of the collective, and engage socially and commercially in a way that is beneficial to the individual and collective. As a society (I'm lumping together traditional ed across countries here), we've decided this is high school. But the proxy is a credential, rather than a verifiable set of discrete skills.
Moreover, it seems plausible that socially optimal outcomes only require a certain Y% of the population to achieve adult proficiency. My view is we can get much of the way to adult proficiency for the majority of the population by the end of HS with deliberate curriculum design and *explicit* instruction in logic, critical thinking, and discourse.
