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“These days, students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology. Sorry. So this is a resource to teachers, and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it.”

If you know me, you know this is one of my all-time rant starters.

Making video games is hard work that requires knowledge in a broad spectrum of fields. Many of them, like math and physics, are fields in which traditional teaching methods have failed children since the day the first kid got a home Internet connection.

Kids love to make stuff. Kids love video games. Kids want to make video games. But because Boomers control public schools, not only is the idea of kids making video games in school shot down, it’s shot down with public aggression.

Because Grand Theft Auto is a video game, and because of gamer culture’s high-profile reprehensibility, anything with “video game” on it is shat upon with delight on all levels — except, of course, among kids, who love it all the more because many kids have fantastic bullshit detectors when it comes to adults telling them about right and wrong.

The few adults who understand the potential of game dev in classrooms — and the even fewer Boomers, and the precious fewer Boomers in policy positions in schools or government — do what adults do: they play semantics, spin it, dress it up. Try to sneak it in the front door.

In other words, they — hell, we — call it “interactive media”, because “games in the classroom” jumps up the ass of every shithead parent who sees their child’s time as a commodity to be traded in exchange for a cut in tuition debt down the road. Or we miss the point, fundamentally and entirely, and come up with bullshit like gamification.

But we’ve finally reached the point where kids don’t need Boomers anymore. They don’t need adults. They can finally fix their own shit.

Thomas doesn’t have my excuses from growing up, where I started writing code at 3 years old but hit a wall as soon as the one book on BASIC that I had access to ran out of pages. He can’t say he doesn’t have access to experts, mentors, training, or resources, because he’s a digital native in the truest sense of the word.

He has w3schools, Codecademy, RubyMonk; he has the Khan Academy, OpenCourseWare, Wikipedia, and yeah, even TED; even better, he has Stack Overflow, Quora, and endless forums and open source projects with active communities.

Thomas is proud as hell when he says this, and he should be. But it still breaks my heart:

Not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program. I mean for soccer, you could go to a soccer team. For violin, you could get lessons for a violin. But what if you want to make an app? Kids’ parents might have done some of these things when they were young, but not many parents have written apps!

You know what I wanted to shout when he asked where to go to find out how to make a program?

His fucking school.

Yes, he has a teacher’s sponsorship, which means he has at least one progressive-thinking adult in his school system. He’s fortunate to be in Manhattan Beach instead of, say, Holly Beach.

He has friends behind him, which means he’s in a social environment that doesn’t discourage these pursuits in favor of others.

And shockingly, yes, he has his parents’ sponsorship, with them backing him financially and philosophically.

Even with all of these exceptional advantages, he has to teach himself how to build an app, and build a club himself for his school to provide a structured place to share his knowledge. He has to get his own iOS device and learn the SDK on his own.

When I worked on a non-profit project to get game dev into Louisiana public school curricula, and when we ran those kids through two weeks — just two weeks! — of it, it changed their lives. It changed their perception of education. It gave them goals they wanted to learn, sparked leadership and entrepreneurship, organically fostered teamwork.

Put game development tools in front of kids with no experience, training, or even interest and they’ll carve out roles for themselves on their own. Put them in front of those tools with an experienced mentor and they’ll show up the adults.

But as an adult, I keep forgetting that we don’t have to save these kids from themselves, or a lack of opportunity, or their environment. We have to save them from us, mostly by getting the hell out of their way.

So here’s to Thomas Suarez, and hopefully a million more kids who won’t let deficient curricula, dumbass backwards old people who try to control their future, dumbass misguided adult allies who try and fail to fix the older dumbasses, and especially their infuriating helicopter parents who live in abject terror for decades about college acceptance letters, get between them and their dreams.

I’m proud of him, I can’t express how proud I am of him. I’m equally disgusted in us for failing a kid like him in 2011.

This is probably the best we can do, which is pathetic. His club won’t reach the kids who don’t already have an interest in logic, which means those kids won’t see the benefits of thinking in code or have the same chance to understand how the world works in an engaging way that speaks in a vocabulary they already own.

What if Thomas couldn’t afford a iPod Touch, a Mac, and the App Store fee? What if he couldn’t afford a computer? Whoops! The world gets one fewer inspiring TED talk to watch today and one fewer kid sows himself the seeds of a few million dollars, or an inspirational career as an educator, or any of a million things Thomas now gets with this background that peers without his gifts and determination and work ethic and luck won’t.

But if the kids with an interest in code learn, build, and teach it on their own, and if they can resist having any of it hijacked by adults — well-meaning or otherwise — they at least won’t continue to be smothered by the stupidity inherent in being ruled by people who are simply old.