Where does programming fit in education?

It's great that programming is coming to the fore in UK education and that this new-found enthusiasm is starting to spread to the US.

But where does programming fit with ICT, computer science and maths? How central a subject is it?

What's termed ICT seems to be "how to operate your computer...or generic applications on it...or even past computing forms like calculators". Frankly children are often good at operating the latest tech--usually better than their teachers. Primary schools need to help, verifying that they can do basic operations and offer remedial, individual help if not, but this "operating your computer" should not be a subject per se and is far from programming in subject-matter and required skillset.

What about computer science? It's the specialist subject of how you optimise programs, programming, build large-scale software or even design new programming languages. Important though this is, attaching programming only to CS is too narrow a viewpoint.

Instead, programming is much more fundamental to STEM: it's the way you communicate technical ideas and processes in the modern world. It's as central as that.

You can view it as a superset evolution of mathematical notation, far more general and with the immediate consequence of machine computable results. Programs are the way you write down maths.

And so I believe programming is an integral, core part of maths education. It's the hand-writing of technical ideas and just like hand-writing is in the early years attached to learning English (if you're in England!), so core, basic programming should be attached to maths.

To be clear, I'm not talking calligraphy, but basic hand-writing. Calligraphy is the CS end--the subject in which you study programming in its own right, its nuances, detailed optimisation. Hand-writing is the basic tool, to let everyone communicate. Just like hand-writing is more generally applied than in English, programming is more generally applicable than is today's perception of maths' applicability in schools (though not than maths' actual utility). Whether in geography, economics or science, technical problem solving needs maths and the way you write down and do anything but trivial arithmetic is with programming.

I'm not knocking the new efforts with programming. Far from it. I'm all for getting programming into education under whatever guise is easiest. If making ICT "rigourous" is the politically expedient way, starting there is fine so long as we recognise it just as the start.

It would be folly indeed if in the very country where a mathematician invented the computer and effectively the concept of programming, we should fail to see the crucial integration of programming with maths education.

(Perhaps if Alan Turing had lived longer, computer science would have been generally considered a part of maths, not a separate discipline--just like mechanics or statistics usually are today).