http://comicsidontunderstand.com/wordpress/2011/12/15/ready/

As Seth suggests, there’s an implicit deification of a technical system that actually tends to work the way it does for a variety of technical and historical reasons, some of them good, some of them arbitrary, and some of them plain wrong. But it works the way it does for the time being and a set of human institutions have grown up around the Internet to keep it operating day-to-day because it requires a particular form of care and feeding.

These institutions – such as NANOG and ICANN – unfortunately add to the technical inertia that prevents us from replacing the Internet’s technical system with one that would better meet the social needs and the expectations that we have for systems that do what we think the Internet does.

When the PSTN and the telegraph were the dominant technical communication systems of their particular days, social theorists didn’t deify their technical or institutional systems as vital knowledge for citizens; it was enough to know how to use them.

There’s a great deal of arrogance among the Internet’s booster community, a great deal of denial about the Internet’s shortcomings, and most destructively there’s a tendency among some boosters to try to pass off its shortcomings as virtues. Few technologies have ever been burdened by the inertia that such attitudes cause.

Consider that the cell phone is used by more than twice as many people as the Internet, is roughly as old as the Internet, and has improved more people’s lives in more dramatic ways than the Internet and the ask yourself why it’s not more important to learn civics from how the cell network is designed, operated, and managed.

Cheers,
Sabahattin

For that matter, more people voted for the American Idol finalists in 2010, than were cast in the US national elections that same year.

Less than a quarter of eligible voters age 18-24 bothered to vote in 2010, vs 60% of those age 65 and older. Guess who gets to decide who can introduce what bills when, and who gets to decide if they even come up for a vote, much less whether or not they have the votes to become a law.

Please explain how learning how a router works is going to fix that.

the core class we aren’t teaching our kids that we need to be is Internet Architecture—that should be like government or civics classes are today: a prerequisite for graduation…

…We teach all high school students how a bill becomes a law

Actually, we don’t. Haven’t for 15 or 20 years. Not in real America. Maybe in Norman Rockwell’s America, or a corporate lobbyist’s fantasy of the America they see through the windows of a jet flying 30,000 feet off the ground – where actual people are too small and insignificant to be visible.

In real, public school America, “government and civics”, as you talk about them, have either been:

A) cut altogether (along with art, music and theater and everything else that makes for a better citizen/human being)–during boom years, ironically, because go-go VC-funded digerati couldn’t be troubled to support local taxes to better the public schools their affluent children didn’t attend;
or,
B) redefined as Learning How Free Markets Work , in Our Christian America, in the same way ketchup was redefined as a “vegetable” for school lunches (and by most of the same people, whom most young Internet-savvy citizens couldn’t be troubled to vote out of office).

Throughout most of the non-North/Coastal America, in those states where there is *any* civics requirement, it consists of a single, solitary unit, most commonly split into two parts, with half a unit dedicated to “Free Markets” (actual unit title) and the other half unit spent learning revisionist American history where Thomas Jefferson has been redacted and replaced by Phyllis Schlafly, and Newt Gingrich is considered a viable candidate for President of anything besides his own fan club. Not that most of the Northern/Coastal public schools are much better. They’ve mostly decided just not to teach the controversy.

How a bill becomes law, or anything resembling traditional civics is long gone from public school education. And most colleges in America, public or private don’t, in fact, require CS graduates, or anyone not majoring in the Humanities, to take a single class, nary a single lecture, in government or civics in order to graduate. Every community college in America does not provide the kind of education Wellesley and Oxford do. In point of fact, there are only a handful of traditional, liberal arts colleges left in this country, public or private– the kind that think it matters as much whether you have read Milton, watched Madam Butterfly and appreciated Monet, as it does whether you can milk a VC for start-up cash using packet-switching flapdoodle.

To appreciate the processes through which technical standards are agreed upon is not unlike appreciating the processes through which laws and regulations are agreed upon…

…understanding how the Internet works is like understanding the way society is governed.

Except in the ways in which is it totally different, which is nearly all of them.

What this country needs is not classes about packet-switching in high school in lieu of teaching young citizens how bills actually become law in our representative, centralized, hierarchical, triple-branched, not-anything-like-packet-switching, American political & governance systems.

What we desperately need is for privileged young digerati like you to spend a few weeks outside your IP tower educating–and registering—young voters in the poorest, least connected (in every meaning of the word) neighborhoods in America, explaining to them why their vote does matter. And/or lobbying taxpayers at the state and local level to restore public funding of public education, and for real-world civics to be taught to every American.

Or – here’s a concept – actually teaching real, non-packet-switching civics in an inner-city public school.

Call it a “civics vacation” if that sound appealing, since the term “public service” is so out of vogue these days.

Better yet, call it, “Leveling up in America”, since the latest net-dazzled answer to every real-world issue affecting the real lives of real people is to “gamify” it. You could run contests to see who can last longest among the great untwittered.

It might be, dare I say it, educational.

Among other things, you might deprogram yourself from the illusion that what is good for whatever corporation happens to be paying your bills to promote its corporate interests at the moment is inherently indistinguishable from what is good for America.

Meanwhile, you know what the #1 response is going to be to this comment from the most Internet-savvy of your readers?

“TL;DR”

I’d also take the idea of computer science as a liberal arts education a little bit further than simply stressing architecture. I think in order to have a well rounded computer science education you need to take a wide array of courses, and not just in the computer science department. Personally, I only minored in computer science, but I work as a software engineer professionally and I think that not having been a computer science major has been to my advantage. I think that every computer science student should have an introductory philosophy course (it helps with reasoning and logic), symbollic logic (basically philosophical programming), a physical science (like chemistry or physics), multiple writing courses, and of course math (INCLUDING STATISTICS!).

A lot of things in computer science are conceptual, like the 7 layer model in networking architecture. But I also think that a course about networking would be doing the student a disservice if it did not require the student to implement some of these concepts, like perhaps a simple version of the TCP/IP stack. Similarly, when I took algorithms, we did mathematical analysis, written descriptions, and also had to hand in assignments that were working versions of these algorithms (written in the language of our choice, generally C++)… When we discussed Dijkstra’s algorithm we had to create a working version of it and our program had to read an adjacency matrix and determine the shortest path between two arbitrary points.

Good pedagogy, in any subject, includes an appropriate combination of theory, real world practical examples, discussion, and related issues.

Early on people would ask “but who runs this thing?” We should make sure that future citizens of the world know the answer to this most fundamental of questions.