Malcolm X once said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” With that in mind, today, coding, as a skill, serves as a priority stamp on this passport to the future, propelling you into the opportunities touted as the best and the most lucrative. Likewise, hoards of children have begun to prepare for this priority stamp. Yet, this begets several questions. To name a few: why coding? At what age should children start coding for a better future? How can parents ensure that their children aren’t left behind in this race for success?

 

To answer the first question, coding, the process of writing software, is said to help develop the creative, critical, and computational thinking skills of young children. In this technological age where we’re surrounded by gadgets and algorithms, it is considered to be extremely important that we also comprehend how those gadgets and algorithms work to make the best use of them. Keeping this in mind, the government of India, in July 2020, unveiled the new education policy, making it mandatory for schools to include coding in the curriculum from 6th grade onwards. Moving onto the second question, there are various perspectives to that; yet, some parents espouse the idea that kids start learning how to code at the ages of 4 and 5 when they’re just learning how to spell, in order to make sure, in line with my third question, that they aren’t left behind. However, this fear of being left behind is what companies like WhiteHat Jr. have been milking.

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Let’s take it from the top. In mid-2020, India was under a lockdown. With parents and their young children quarantining together, parents needed something to productively engage their children beyond online school hours. With that emerged several online ed-tech platforms for coding, such as Tekie, Codingal, Codeyoung, but the most prominent of them all would have to be WhiteHat Jr: a 2-year-old online educational company acquired by Byju’s, one of the world’s biggest ed-tech companies. If you’d switch on the TV, you’d most likely see an ad with a celebrity endorsing WhiteHat Jr.; pick up your phone and head to Instagram, a WhiteHat Jr. ad is bound to come up within the first 30 seconds; make a call to an average 6-year-old, they’d be harping on about how they’re now a certified game developer from WhiteHat Jr. Briefly, WhiteHat Jr. was almost pervasive, and why wouldn’t it be? Let’s look at a WhiteHar Jr. ad, touting how a 13-year-old named Wolf Gupta (perhaps a WhiteHat Jr. pupil) learned AI to bag a job from Google with a salary of Rs. 20 crores, claiming that coding can make your children entrepreneurs and scientists and WhiteHat Jr. is thus a means to it.

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All seemed to be going well, only that it wasn’t. WhiteHat Jr.’s aggressive and perhaps even shrewd marketing tactics boomeranged, as skeptics began to look closer. At first in the ads, the aforementioned Wolf Gupta, but now a 9-year-old secured a job worth Rs. 150 crores at Google; next, Wolf Gupta, now at 12 years, bagged a job with a salary of Rs. 1.2 crores, and finally, Wolf Gupta, at 13, landed up with a job of Rs. 20 crores. With these cracks, it didn’t take long for people to realize that Wolf Gupta didn’t exist at all – his name, salary, age, and company were all carefully created to capitalize on the intrinsic fear of getting left behind.

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The worst, however, is yet to come: WhiteHar Jr. began censoring criticism. A man named Pradeep Poonia (under the pseudonym of WhiteHat Sr.) began to call out WhiteHat Jr. for their predatory behavior and misleading advertising, uploading videos on YouTube and other social media channels to support his claims. WhiteHat Jr., however, instead of engaging with the criticism, unleashes copyright strikes on the critic, so much so that he had to create 3 different YouTube channels. When Poonia perseveres, WhiteHat Jr. sues him, seeking $2.7 million in damages, with the accusations of infringing trademarks, spreading misleading information, accessing the company’s confidential chats, among others. Yet, amidst all of this, WhiteHat Jr. also validates what they have been accused of, admitting that, for example, Wolf Gupta was only a fictitious character and no Rs. 150 crore packages can be obtained with a course, that they were only just tapping into the deep-seated fears in parents.

 

Soon, WhiteHar Jr. became one of the most criticized companies on the internet, yet some parents still spend a fortune on such coding camps and crash courses without ascertaining their truth. Try this: go on WhiteHat Jr.’s website, surf through the sample apps, and search the names of those apps on the app store. Count the number of critical reviews or even the names under which those apps are registered. You’ll have the naked truth. With this, it’s important to look into why this is happening – why are children being raised as startups? Is it because just as the previous generation was made to memorize mathematical formulas as the ladder to success, this generation is being made to memorize lines of code?

 

Coding is an extremely important skill and should be inculcated from a young age, keeping in mind the growing importance of computer literacy, and its role in promoting cognitive skills. Yet, coding camps don’t necessarily help develop those cognitive skills; instead, they often tend to create obedient executors spouting memorized lines of code. If parents want to ensure that their children aren’t left behind, we must give them their own space for exploration, which companies promising the moon likely don’t have.

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Written by: Unnathi Kumar

Edited by: Aarushi Bhansal 

Designed by: Siya Mehra