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Last April I had a chance to speak to a group of about 30 High School Juniors about being an entrepreneur. I was one of 4 speakers and we all shared our stories and provided the students with a few pearls of wisdom we all learned along the way.
The students seemed pretty engaged and asked a few questions. But one thing stuck with me.
When I was giving my talk, I asked how many of them had ever heard of analytics or data science? None raised their hand.
I then asked how many are learning coding in school now. Two tentatively raised their hands.
Sigh.
I talked a little bit more about what can be done with analytics, why it's a lucrative field to get into and how it's important for entrepreneurs to be data savvy.
They listened, but I could tell they didn't really comprehend much because there was no frame of reference.
Double Sigh.
What are we doing? Shouldn't some sort of coding and working with data be more common in your typical American high school experience.
The fact that it's not, combined with the fact that an ever-increasing number of jobs require data analysis skill, added to the fact that I know from first-hand experience a lot of Asian countries have already added basic coding to their secondary education curriculums is highly depressing.
It sounds kinda dramatic, but it made me shudder to think we might have already lost the next world war because we didn't teach enough kids to read and write code.
We have already lost the technology edge in so many areas and this is one of the root causes.
I guess that means triple sigh.