These two tweets showed up this morning within about an hour of each other. There was a lot of discussion by panelists at the SG talkshop about what ought to be on the curriculum in architecture schools to equip students for future practice. Some said compulsory biology courses, others said compulsory physics, and a few days before MB and I had been discussing the merits of including some industrial design courses into the course gamut.

There was also a recent article about New York city starting up a computer science high school so it seems like a bit of a Zeitgeist topic. Computational literacy seems to be pretty much a no-brainer for the coming generation of people. In the past you couldn’t be ‘a man’ unless you could tune twin Webber carburetors or a woman if you couldn’t bake a perfect Victoria sponge cake. Those requirements, and the gender distinctions that go along with them seem to be totally irrelevant these days, but there isn’t much to replace them. Creating and interacting with computers is pretty much ubiquitous now, you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who doesn’t need to do it for their work in some capacity. Bolting together websites and building iPhone apps is probably going to end up as a fairly common job, something like a cottage industry, so the skills needed will end up pretty central in high school education.

I wonder if the discussion about that should be compulsory or not in arch education is the wrong question, and that letting students chose their own path a bit more, (maybe leading to less defined degree names). Five years is an incredibly long time, so people could cover the requirements for registration (if that even remains relevant/important) and still chose a whole bunch of courses that are less aligned to the standard path. Any kind of compulsory module constrains an already hugely overconstrained intellectual pool (more on this next post), but widening the pool of possible options is surely a good idea?

This all assumes that going to university for learning is actually a good idea, which I’m increasingly sceptical about.