Getting Everyone the IT Education They Need
Mark Guzdial · 2021
The inventors of the term "computer science" meant for it to be something that was taught to everyone, to facilitate learning other subjects, and to help people understand the risks of technology in their lives. Alan Perlis (with Newell and Simon) published the first definition of "computer science" in Science in 1967 [6]. In 1961, he argued at MIT that everyone at the academia should learn to program, to give them a new way to understand their world [10]. At the same event, C.P. Snow (author of The Two Cultures [11]) argued that we should teach everyone about computing so that they would understand the dangers in our new computerized society [12]. He wrote: "A handful of people, having no relation to the will of society, having no communication with the rest of society, will be taking decisions in secret which are going to affect our lives in the deepest sense."