[throwaway154]

Skills based education:

Learn how to push a button A on a machine to start it, how to push button B to stop it. This can be learnt (and tested) perfectly. It is the ultimate in skills-based education.

Along the way, having worked on a few machines, a worker may piece together some information about 'starting' and 'stopping'. However, this is beyond what's needed.

Should schools be about skill based education? Or about that beyond what's needed? Beyond what's needed won't get the employer a greater short term fungible labour marginal return, why pay for it? Shareholder value!

Does it matter that no one learns Flutter? Teaching Turing [1] may be a step too far in taking programming away from real life. So it's a balance. But so so much more goes into learning computer science than programming language of the day that can be learned from Udemy. From O(n log n) to O(n), how a computer works under the bonnet, what a LLM is, to legal aspects, there's a lot more to computer science as a skill. The challenge of the education system is balancing sketchy employers and pitch-fork public, and the influence they have, that want a cheap quick fix vs actually empowering and inspiring high schoolers' futures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language)