15. Every Child Should Be Able to Code

In this article, author Robinson Meyer talks about the Washington Ideas Forum, where Megan Smith, U. S. Chief Technology Officer, spoke about future prospects, returning always to a theme of "talent." According to Megan Smith, children should be taught to code in early in school. Teaching them to code would be a way of engaging in active learning of STEM principles. Her point of view is that technology and the government have to be a unit that functions together, not separately. She also argues that "code-training academies" could make citizens able to fill millions of unfilled IT job roles. Reporter Ben Smith argued that filling job roles has been a years-old endeavour, but Megan Smith counters by giving statistics of academies that have acheived very high success rates in students finding jobs. Thus, teaching code in academies can be the key to the future.
Author Robinson Meyer does a good job of addressing the various topics discussed by Megan Smith and Ben Smith, and he uses effective descriptions, but his rhetoric itself is not very strong. While he noticeably uses procatalepsis, or responding to an opposing argument, it is only with a small objection rather than a valid counterargument. Meyer exposes Megan Smith's point of view, but he does not go beyond what was said in the forum; no implications, deductions, propositions. This made for a somewhat bland article at times, more descriptive than persuasive. However, Meyer does do one thing right; he transitions very well between ideas, and he makes a clever conclusion by referencing a music group, "The Smiths," since his article is about two different Smiths.

http://m/theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/us-cto-every-child-should-be-able-to-code/382089/