Whether colleges truly teach programming properly or not is a subjective matter. I would like to have my take on this. Several key factors play a role, to shape up a student in his/ her programming journey. These factors can include stuff like how much rating the college has, what sort of professors do the college has, and lastly, the type of curriculum & teaching methods the college undertakes.
Talking from my own personal experience, I had to face several hurdles and invest a lot of time to learn programming on my own from the Internet as opposed to relying on the teachings from college. Our college follows a very classic teaching style in India which emphasizes more on mugging up and theories as opposed to practical classes. Even during practical classes we would be sitting on our chairs and writing 'notes' on our 'exercise books' by looking at the board as opposed to actually typing some code on the computer. Although, I must admit that it is true that we were taught everything from the very basics; starting from the syntax to basic programming language like C to concepts on data structures, but despite learning so much, I truly didn't feel that I learned something productive which I could actually use in real life to build something.
The thing is, most of these Colleges don't really teach us 'Computer Science'. A person who truly understands Computer Science would be able to make productive usage of the Software available to him, and 'build' something which could benefit the society. In order to build that piece of software, knowing some syntaxes of a programming language and some data structures is not enough. What really needs to be taught are code 'frameworks' instead of the language itself. If you learn the framework then you will automatically be able to use the language.
After investing some time in the past few weeks, to learn JavaScript and React to make actual 'projects'; it came to my realization that how important project based learning truly is. To add to that, learning to use a powerful tool like GitHub for the first time made me sit and think if the college education is even needed at all or not. After learning to use Git , I can't even fathom the fact that the Colleges don't teach something so basic yet so important to the Students which in turn would inevidently help them in future as it is used everywhere in the industry.
So to conclude my short blog, I would like to say it again that yes , colleges indeed don't teach programming properly (for the most part). To change this, there needs to be a change in the curriculum and the way it is taught. There is absolutely no reason to have theory classes or at least 80% of it should be non-theory. Students should learn to code by 'typing' it themselves; and instead of focusing on 'learning C' or 'learning Java' , they should focus on learning frameworks, and build projects. They will understand things on their own.
Top comments (1)
Indeed! You will not learn everything in school, but they will teach you the basic you need to know. This is not only in programming but in every college program. It's also true that some schools teaches more of theory instead of actual work. Luckily, there are schools in the Philippines who have specialize their program in teaching actual programming languages instead of giving theoretical ideas. CIIT is one of the best example of college school that change the teaching methods in terms of computer science program.