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Is Code School the New High School?
Once upon a time, in the days of Napster free music downloading, and the huge controversy and debate that engendered, about digital rights and intellectual property, around then, I was invited to teach a code school set up by the police department in Hillsboro, Oregon, in the heart of the Silicon Forest. Why?
The police were frustrated as their new role was to come in to the public schools and lecture on the evils of stealing or “pirating” as we were learning to call illegal copying. The intellectual property lawyers were keen to instill strong capitalist values in the coming generation and what better time than in school?
However these police were well aware of GNU / GPL, Linux, Creative Commons and all the open source stuff happening, intentionally free stuff. Might we tell the kids about all that, encouraging them to stay on the Internet in a way that was advantageous to growing a skill set? Why scare them away from their favorite new intellectual endeavor?
The Hillsboro police chief at the time, of Chinese immigrant heritage, authorized a “tuXlab” (Linux-learning classroom) be built in West Precinct, not unlike what the Shuttleworth Foundation had set up around the Republic of South Africa (RSA), along with Freedom Toasters.
I would learn more about tuXlabs in coming chapters, such as when I actually joined Mark Shuttleworth and his international team, for a confab in Kensington, Greater London. Guido van Rossum was there, the inventor of Python, along with experts in various pedagogical techniques and computer languages. Alan Kay, of Squeak and Smalltalk fame, also joined us, conveying regrets from one of Logo’s inventors, the South African born Seymour Papert (February 29, 1928 — July 31, 2016), feeling too old for international jet travel.
Kids from the post-Apartheid projects, from the ghettos, the townships, were very hungry for hands-on experience with computers and would not tolerate schooling without them. Every South African deserved an opportunity to master the power tools of their generation, as a birthright that none should deny them — that was their attitude.
