What is said is partially true. The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends. However Basic and Logo or Excel is not true. I graduated in 2004 and Java was the most prominent language we used, followed by C++ and then C. All of these are very relevant even today.
However it was upto the students to explore more outside of what is taught in the curriculum. Even if you are not willing to actually learn programming you can still get good enough marks in both theory and practical exams. We had four practical projects but most of the projects were widely "purchased" from ready-made shops instead of the students doing it themselves, and the instructors were not competent enough to figure out if the projects are copied or self-made.
What should be taught in modern day schools should be Assembly (to get the basics), C/C++, ML/AI, Java, Algorithms and Data structures (Can't stress this enough - even a full year can be dedicated for this) and have at least one project each semester and have all projects scrutinised by external faculties.
>>The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends.
No instituition. Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books every time something the equivalent of React or Angular JS comes along.
You generally teach the base skills from which much can be learned and grown.
Also I don't understand this thing about asking colleges to train people in the latest tech that is out there.
In almost all cases I have seen, you are way better off hiring good generalists than one trick ponies.
> Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books
The situation is different in India.. Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops. Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India. Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.
Did I mention Angular or React? I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of. React and Angular are just libraries and any one can learn them if they have solid programming base.
But ML/AI is a very different beast as they require you to have good solid understanding of mathematics, statistics, probability theorem etc, which is difficult to acquire outside without spending considerable amount of time.
>>Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops.
All schools/colleges are that way. Unless you join a PhD program. Also in the west, emphasis on taking skill based courses is high. They even have a term for the other type of courses, they call it, Underwater basket weaving.
>>Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India.
Thanks to our population numbers. And why is this wrong. STEM education makes a person think, at-least, comparatively, more rationally than other courses do.
>>Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.
India is already doing enough. But at our scale everything breaks.
>>I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of.
Why only ML/AI? Because they are in demand now? A few days back it was Hadoop etc. Before that Java...
NO only that, but because it can be the new IT. Java, Hadoop etc are only languages and frameworks, that had at most a life span of a decade. But ML/AI is a whole new world. If things are going to be progressing in the current pace, then ML/AI could have a big impact on the world as the personal computers did and can be the next big thing of this century.
All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect. There could be serious job losses all over the world. And with the biggest of population in the whole world, India would be the worst affected.. It is best for any country's interest to progress in AI so that they could have a say in future policy related to AI, not to mention getting more jobs related to that field.
Few of the several fields that could be affected by a combination of AI/Robots/Automation that I could think of ->
> Manufacturing / Factory workers
> Defence personnel
> Agriculture
> Auto drivers (Taxi, Truck, Rail, Ship whatsoever)
> Teaching (Virtual teaching)
> Construction (Ready-made materials combined with smart machines)
> Medical professionals (X-Ray diagnostics etc)
> Doctors (though far-stretched but could be possible)
Why now? No body have solid answers when or will this happen, but if you look closely it's been only couple of years that machines got the ability to beat humans in at least few tasks we figured would require advanced intelligence, including accurate visual/speech recognition. That coupled with smart robots, and automation could replace a large percentage of existing jobs. Self-driving cars are a proof of this. This is little scary, but not alarming if there are proper policies in place. Any country need to be in the forefront of this technology or else can get sidelined really quickly.
For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it. The real math behind all this stuff is quite old. There are already courses available to do that. Indian statistical institute offers beginner to advanced courses in statistics which you can take, they have been available for decades now.
Anything that you will likely do with ML/AI will likely involve using a framework today.
>>All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect.
We don't even know if that kind of AGI is possible, let alone achieving it anytime soon.
Heck we haven't even come close to defining what AGI is.
>>For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it.
Frameworks only provide part of it. In the case of AI, they just provide a general way to represent neural networks. Each use case need a different type of network with hundreds of parameters fine tuned and trained. Of course you can download pre-built algorithms and model zoos, but they are at best couple of years old.
Also do you think that the best things will be available under a framework? There are open source frameworks (like Tensorflow), but you will be surprised at the amount of research under progress and what portion of it is available for public. For e.g. look at the amount of work that China is doing in the field (And available for public scrutiny) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhp47v5OBXQ.
India (or any other Country) could do proper research in the area or end up buying these stuff from other countries, provided they give state of art technology to others. Just imagine a drone or an army of drones equipped with such AI technology can survey 24/7 and instantly take down your enemy even across a country.
However it was upto the students to explore more outside of what is taught in the curriculum. Even if you are not willing to actually learn programming you can still get good enough marks in both theory and practical exams. We had four practical projects but most of the projects were widely "purchased" from ready-made shops instead of the students doing it themselves, and the instructors were not competent enough to figure out if the projects are copied or self-made.
What should be taught in modern day schools should be Assembly (to get the basics), C/C++, ML/AI, Java, Algorithms and Data structures (Can't stress this enough - even a full year can be dedicated for this) and have at least one project each semester and have all projects scrutinised by external faculties.