I think digital skills are as important as the three Rs of traditional education (Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic), and deserve as much attention. TBC, IMHO "digit

I think digital skills are as important as the three Rs of traditional education (Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic), and deserve as much attention. TBC, IMHO "digital skills" encompass far more than learning about files/folders and using a word processor, and are probably worth unpacking over a decade of education, much like the other three topics. (though it is early enough to crystallize into a definite formal curriculum -- which makes it difficult to integrate into the current school system) As people's lives come to be dominated by computing/algorithmic/automation technology, people need to be able to make sense of the world in order to be able to function as intelligent beings with autonomy/agency. Otherwise they will be fundamentally dependent on the feudal lords who control their information+computing experience. Market forces will create apps/services that will cater to certain profitable use-cases, but that is far from sufficient. Over the last decade, we're seeing adults continue to fail miserably at this -- which indicates that their level of preparation is woefully inadequate. As a concrete example, it is difficult to understand how stupid a computer is (even massively-hyped AI models) till you try to implement a statistical reasoning model and see it stumble repeatedly in an apparently "simple", "common-sense" use case. Once you've gone through that exercise, you will never take the AI-hype or automated ranking/rating/etc at face value. Enough foundational knowledge to tell apart snake-oil salesmen (eg: predicting criminal recidivism from mugshots) is absolutely crucial as these things become ubiquitous and form a Kafkaesque network that determines the quality of people's lives (online shopping, online news/info, social media, credit rating, job-eligibility filtering, smart contracts, digital currency, etc.). Heck, most people currently cannot grok the security-vs-recoverability tradeoff of fully-encrypted information on their phones! For the literate age, we decided that reading & writing would be foundational skills for almost all human experience. If the computing revolution is as important as the print revolution, we must give as much importance to "digital skills".