Technical Literacy Quotes

I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.

What are we going to do as automation increases, as computers get more sophisticated? One thing that people say is we'll retrain people, right? We'll take coal miners and turn them into data miners. Of course, we do need to retrain people technically. We need to increase technical literacy, but that's not going to work for everybody.

It is difficult putting technical developments in a language that policy makers can understand.

We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues.

Technical understanding should be a core competency of any company.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

With concerted effort, I can follow written instructions, but don't ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smartphone.

For the future, primarily, we must educate people in science, engineering, technology and math.

Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands.

Coding is like writing, and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution. What's happened is that maybe everybody knows how to use computers, like they know how to read, but they don't know how to write.

How far back to the elementary school core curriculum do we have to go to get someone on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology caught up?

As software began to be sold to people who would never consider themselves technical, it suddenly became clear that you needed people who spoke their language.

Our society expects that everyone should learn to write, even though very few become professional writers. Similarly, I think that everyone should learn how to program, even though very few will become professional programmers.

Wired people should know something about wires.

We are more dependent on science and engineering than at any other time in history. However, there is plenty of evidence that far too many people are scientifically illiterate, often having been put off science at school.

We need a lot more technically literate people. The computers are the tools that are going to solve essentially all problems, and the people who can use them better will be more effective.

I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.