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It's important to distinguish the trees from the forest. To me, the call for BASIC tools is a mere twig or branch: the broader branch calls for a widely-accepted programming language in which kids can learn to instruct machines.
(BTW, I thought BASIC was alright -- I coded a payroll package on a C-64 myself, in Nigeria, in the '80s. But many felt Pascal was a better instructional language. I considered pure Prolog the "language of thought". Today, I read of Alice and Squeak as being the lingos du jour. Who cares?)
But the wider point is indeed that kids don't know where stuff comes from, how stuff works, etc. And it is to these selfsame kids that we are bequeathing the world. My teenage nephew's friend looked up from surfing the Web on my PC, and was astonished that "Jordan" was a country -- that such a country existed. I have a six-year-old step-son who thought beef comes from supermarket packaging. You don't need to learn the saxophone or the tuba -- you can synthesize and sample them, so all you need is some piano-keyboard skills. Or Logic Pro and a mouse.
And if you don't agree with me that this has linkage with school kids going on the rampage with guns, I give up. WE -- OUR generation -- came up with video games that majored on shoot-em-ups. WE -- adults -- make the films that major in violence. WE -- adults -- leave guns lying around, smoke, do drugs, and such like. WE MAY know the consequences. But the kids don't. Because we teach them -- implicitly, by acts of omission -- that there aren't consequences.
So: kids aren't interested in antecedents, and they know nothing of consequences.
We're bringing new generations up to be ignorant, passive consumers. Our fault.
And we expect them to show respect for elders? Puh-leeze, mister!
