From the social efficient point of view, students should be equipped with skills and knowledge necessary to participate in society and to perform well in the jobs offered there. Studies show that skills related to CS are required by an increasing amount of jobs. There are currently over 600.000 open jobs related to CS in the U.S.A, even though only a few dozen thousands of CS students graduate each year ¹. A Dutch company reports over 50.000 open jobs in the ICT sector in the first three months of 2021 ². With such expectancy, the sector requires one percent each year (!) of the total Dutch population to start a job with them.

Even without considering jobs directly related to the field, studies moreover show that a growing number of employers ask that workers perform “non-repetitive tasks that require critical thinking and technical skills” ³. Such tasks involve for example automating spreadsheets, programming queries, accessing online databases, and operating physical computing devices. It stands to reason that schools will have to prepare students for this changing nature of the labor market.

In the view of a social reconstructionist, students are to develop a vision on how to reconstruct society for the better. Good CS education is crucial in this, since many of its core topics such as algorithms and digital privacy play a major role in many aspects of modern society. Algorithms influence our daily-life experience and decision making ⁴, and learning what it is will help students become better aware of possible influences that modern technologies can have in their personal lives. People who have insufficient familiarity with notions such as algorithms are likely to be more vulnerable to voter and consumer manipulation and to cybercrime, and they are less likely to obtain leadership positions, whence they can reconstruct society for the better.

It is also crucial that students learn about the concept of digital privacy and how personal data is used in computational tools (think of cookies, for example). In doing so, not only will they be empowered to protect their own digital privacy in a way that suits them, but also, and perhaps more importantly, they will learn to see that, nowadays, personal data are considered valued things that can be exploited for knowledge (through big data analysis) and profit (by applying smart marketing strategies based on the analyses). Even if students end up in jobs not directly related to CS, it is essential that leaders of future generations understand the gravity of the need to securely and responsibly handle people’s personal data, and have a basic understanding of what this means exactly.

Another convincing argument for a social reconstructionist is that we want to combat existing inequalities in society and prevent potential ones. Leadership positions need to be taken by groups of people that represent the entire population with all its diversities. All young people should be given the opportunity to assume influential positions. Since good CS education increases their chances to do this, it should not be offered only in a small selection of schools that happen to have sufficient financial resources for it. If we want all our students to have an equal opportunity to change society for the better, every school should offer them a good CS curriculum.

For a learner centered ideologist, where teachers are expected to contribute to student learning by providing them with enjoyable and meaningful experiences, it is important that students obtain tools to express themselves creatively. In an evermore digitizing world, teachings in for example graphics design, website design, and media computation—which are all CS related topics—will clearly empower them to be creative and allow them to engage in meaningful projects.

Computer science should not be viewed as a stand-alone subject. Rather, the field represents a paradigm shift that brings about a whole new way of thinking, allowing many different creative outlets. This new paradigm is sometimes referred to as computational literacy:

“Learning to use a new medium takes effort. The printing press was a huge leap in human history, but that leap did not happen until many more people became literate. A printing press is not of much use unless authors know how to write and your audience knows how to read. Achieving computational literacy in society means that people can read and write with computation, which includes an ability to read and write computer programs.” —diSessa, cited in ⁵

Computational literacy and the use of computational tools not only provides a creative outlet for students, it also has the potential to provide more meaning and better understanding of other school subjects, perhaps the most obvious one being mathematics. Although learning to program has little effect on students’ skills in arithmetic ⁶, it certainly helps a student to better comprehend abstract concepts such as length and ratio ⁷, and support his algebra and the use of variables ⁸. There is also strong evidence that students may better understand physics through computing ⁹. If taught properly, CS definitely has an enormous potential to provide more joy and meaning in students’ experience, and to empower them in their creative expressiveness.

Scholar academic ideologists view the teaching of a subject from the perspective of the academic discipline. Students are to be introduced to the existing knowledge, and encouraged to discover new truths in the field later in their lives, for example by working for research institutes. As a scientific field, CS is still young, but universities already welcome large proportions of students (5.7% in 2020 in the U.K. ¹⁰) into undergraduate CS related studies. As a field that is rapidly finding so much solid ground in our universities, it seems only logical to establish it in middle and high school curricula too.

Computer Science, with computational thinking at its core, offers an enormous library of algorithms and data structures, representing knowledge that is completely new to any other existing academic field or school subject and should therefore be represented as a school subject in its own right.

Reasons to include good quality CS courses in every middle and high school curriculum are abundant and powerful. The labor market is transforming in such a way that our workforce needs to be provided with skills and knowledge provided by CS. In addition, comprehension of CS concepts makes people less prone to manipulation and cybercrime, and more likely to obtain influential positions, for which every student should get equal opportunity. Moreover, CS has a great potential to help students expressing themselves creatively in an evermore digitizing world, and to enhance the meaning of other school subjects. The field has well-established study programs in universities that keep growing. All in all, CS should evidently play a central role in any middle and high school curriculum.