Why programming should be as compulsory as math

Imagine that tomorrow Spain's Ministry of Education decided math was no longer compulsory in secondary school. That it became an elective, that not everyone needs to know how to calculate, that anyone who wants to learn can do it on their own. The outcry would be enormous, and rightly so.

Well, we've been doing exactly that with programming for decades. And in 2026, when much of our daily life runs on software, that's becoming a problem we can't keep ignoring.

Why programming isn't a technical skill

The most common mistake in the debate about programming in schools is treating it as a specialized technical skill, like welding or calibrating industrial machinery. Useful for whoever goes into it, optional for everyone else.

Programming isn't a technical skill. It's a way of thinking. It's the ability to break a complex problem into smaller steps, to spot patterns, to understand that systems have causes and effects and that those effects can be anticipated. Those abilities aren't only useful if you end up as a developer. They're useful in almost any intellectual activity.

There's something we often say at AC Academy: many of the students who have gone through our programs and now work as developers didn't come in intending to change careers. They came because someone explained that understanding how software works would make them better at what they already did. And they were right.

Swift as a first language: a serious proposal

For years, the debate about which language to teach first in schools went back and forth between Logo, Scratch, Python and, more recently, JavaScript. Each with its advocates and its arguments.

Swift has an advantage its competitors don't: it was explicitly designed to be learnable, with a clear syntax that cuts down the noise and compiler errors that explain what's wrong and why, not just that something failed. Swift Playgrounds takes that philosophy a step further: an interactive environment where the result of what you write is visible immediately, with no setup, no terminals, no complicated installs.

Apple has invested considerable resources in building school curricula around Swift and Swift Playgrounds precisely because it understands the problem isn't just the language: it's the whole ecosystem around learning. A twelve-year-old doesn't need to learn how to configure a development environment. They need to write something, see it work and want to write more.

The teaching challenge nobody wants to tackle

There's a real obstacle in all of this that curriculum debates consistently ignore: teachers. Not because teachers don't want to teach programming. Because in most cases nobody has taught them.

You can have the best secondary school curriculum in the world on computational thinking. If the teacher who has to deliver it learned programming twenty years ago with C++, or has never programmed at all, the result is going to fall short. Not for lack of will: for lack of up-to-date training and lack of confidence in the classroom when a student asks something that goes off script.

The fix isn't to look away. It's real, hands-on, ongoing teacher training. Something that in Spain, unfortunately, is still the exception rather than the rule when it comes to technology in the classroom.

What a student who can program can do that others can't

We're not talking about turning every student into a developer. We're talking about something more basic: that when a student from any discipline reaches university or the job market, they understand what software is, how it works and what they can ask of someone who knows how to build it.

A biologist who understands programming can automate analyses that would otherwise take weeks. A journalist who understands how an algorithm works can cover technology stories with a rigor that's missing today. A doctor who understands the software interpreting their diagnoses can ask questions they otherwise wouldn't even know how to phrase.

Programming in schools isn't an investment in the tech industry. It's an investment in the quality of reasoning across the whole of society. And it's a conversation Spain has been putting off for far too long.