The tiny Baltic country of 1.3 million people has long led the way on issues like e-government and e-health.
When Estonia won its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, its economy produced very little and its people literally went hungry following the collapse of the Soviet economy and food and goods distribution systems.
The factories of capital Tallinn were like museums of obsolete industrial technology.
Fortunately, Estonia had a very westward- looking population, with access to Finnish TV (the languages are closely related) and many emigres living in Sweden and Finland.
It also had a very youthful leadership, with ministers in their twenties and early thirties who were determined to make a fresh start.
The country set out to become as positive to technology and innovation as Scandinavia, with the advantage of a little more resourcefulness.
Estonians had been brought up in a society where improvisation and do-it-yourself skills became important when dealing with Soviet bureaucracy and frequent Soviet equipment breakdowns.
So, within years of independence, Estonia streamlined its bureaucracy to make it easy to start up new firms.
A flat income tax was introduced to encourage entrepreneurs. A programming culture evolved which eventually led to KaZaa and Skype.
Skype may have been co-founded by Swedish and Danish entrepreneurs, but it was built by Estonian engineers, an intense source of pride.
E-government and e-services were pushed too. The government went online early, and the country pioneered electronic signatures, online banking services, mobile phone payments for car parking and internet voting in national elections.
An e-health system allowed people to read their health details and order prescribed medicines online.
Finally the government introduced the e-school platform, which offered a 24-hour classroom where students could check their test results and do other school-related stuff.
Now the Tiigrihüppe (Tiger Leap) foundation, which has been involved with e-initiatives since 1996, is piloting the ProgeTiigri project; teaching seven-year-olds to code as part of the standard curriculum.
The project is being trialled in a small number of schools starting this term in Grade 1, and expects eventually to cover the whole country and all age groups as more teachers are trained and study materials prepared.
Bigger European countries will surely be watching the Estonian experiment closely.
Most governments and experts are convinced the development of proper computer skills among the population is a key to 21st century prosperity.
Coding teaches people an important life skill - how to think analytically - even if they don't become programmers in later life.
But just taking Britain, for instance, the proportion of students studying computer science has dropped from 5 per cent to 3 per cent of the annual intake in a decade - and it has become ever more male dominated.
Some say that programming skills among youngsters at large are worse than they were two decades ago. Today, it is argued, teenagers are content consumers, enjoying a surfeit of music and film on their iPads and smartphones.
Two or three decades ago they messed around with their Vic 20s or BBC Micros and learned proper, if basic, programming: content production of sorts.
In British schools ICT can be studied at GCSE level, but the subject has been criticised for focusing on word processing and spreadsheet skills, rather than how to program computers.
On seeing the Estonian coding announcement, one American wag joked: “Great, we’ll just bring these Estonians to America in 20 years’ time,” but I suspect most countries will look to copy Estonia’s educational innovation for their own schools rather than one day steal their programmers.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Pelle Neroth
Quelle/Source: E&T magazine, 21.09.2012
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