A Compiler for Every Child

With a presidential campaign in full swing, education is in the spotlight of would-be chief executives of the US of A. When talking about education, they tend to be talking about No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration's first-term educational initiative.

Now it's hard to argue with the idea that kids should not be left behind. We can all agree on that. But what about moving children ahead, far ahead, so that they can compete, and help the USA compete, in the next few years? Globalization is here to stay, but the USA's place in the world is very much up for grabs. Even more so when it comes to keeping the lead in technology.

Case in point. CodeGear, a leading developer of software development tools and one of the few companies other than Microsoft that is still in the market, just sold a million copies of its latest development tools for use in education. This is spectacularly good news for those lucky primary and secondary school kids because they can use professional-grade tools to learn the latest high tech skills.

The surprise moment is that the kids benefiting from this massive effort live in Russia. The million copies are part of a $100 million initiative in Russia called the National and State Project for High Grade Education. The mission is to build the backbone for 21st century education. In US schools programming is an elective at best, introduced much later than primary school. And there hasn't been much of a serious initiative since BASIC language.

In the US, we've prided ourselves on technological edge. We have at least four regions of the country (Silicon Valley, the Seattle area, the Route 128 area near Boston, and the research triangle in North Carolina) in which tech drives the economy and helps maintain our world leadership. What we don't have is a national vision for tech education. Nobody in Washington is calling on CodeGear to deliver C++ compilers and Delphi tools to the 15 million kids in public high schools in the USA.

I'm sure CodeGear is more than ready to offer the US a good deal, but first we need to think about tempering No Child Left Behind with All Children Move Forward.