Programming Shakespeare

Imagine everyone in high school could program computers — both students and teachers. In particular, assume that this skill was developed through elementary and school in a careful and progressive manner, much as reading and writing are now in the best case.

In such a scenario, how would the teaching of non science/math classes be different from the way they are now? Would teachers assign students such tasks as finding patterns in the works of Shakespeare?

Would students learn how to procedurally find and display progressive changes of style throughout the romantic age of English poetry, or how to demonstrate correspondences between changing demographics during early 20th century America and the rise of the modern urban landscape?

Would the whole notion of what kinds of things students can understand in their English and Social Studies classes become expanded, as young people find they have the tools to do original research with available databases, as well as to present those results in bold and graphically compelling ways?

I don’t know the answer — since we do not yet live in that world — but I think it is a question worth asking.

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