The Literacy We Forgot to Teach: Coding

Code School CEO Sadaf Rehman Speaks at TEDxFCCU Women 2025

At TEDxFCCU Women 2025, Code School cofounder and CEO Sadaf Rehman delivered a talk that challenged a central blind spot in global education: the absence of coding as a core literacy.

In today’s world, the ability to read, write, and do math is considered the foundation of education. But there’s a fourth essential skill we’ve ignored for far too long: coding.

In Rehman's talk, this oversight was brought into sharp focus. While the global conversation barrels toward artificial intelligence, we’re failing to build the one thing that truly matters: human intelligence. And nowhere is this more urgent than in our education systems.

1.8 Billion Students. Coding Literacy Missing.

There are 1.8 billion children currently in school. Yet most of them will spend 12 years there and never properly learn how to code.

That’s not just a gap. It’s a crisis.

In a world where every profession now demands some level of tech fluency, coding can no longer be treated as a niche subject. Whether a child wants to become a doctor, engineer, artist, or entrepreneur, the ability to think computationally, to break down problems, to build solutions, to understand the digital world, is now fundamental.

The Curriculum Vacuum

Unlike math or science, coding hasn’t had 200 years to mature. There’s no global standard. No universally accepted curriculum. No clear consensus on what to teach, when, or how.

The result? Schools are fumbling. Most teach coding too late, too theoretically, or not at all. Even the best-funded schools reduce it to a few hours of typing practice or drag-and-drop activities disconnected from real problem-solving.

The Code School model addressed this head-on by designing a structured 10-year coding journey that maps outcomes from Grade 1 to Grade 10, across multiple languages and platforms. The curriculum is fun, game-based, and grounded in the principle that we don’t know which language kids will use in the future, but we can teach them to think like problem solvers today.

From Grassroots to Policy Reform

You can’t build a 21st-century nation on a 20th-century syllabus.

Based on Rehman's expertise with Code School, she was appointed the Computer Science Curriculum reform lead for the National Curriculum Council of Pakistan, a federal body that determines national curriculum standards that are adopted by provinces. Her work saw the first computer science curriculum reform since 2006, where new domains - including coding, use of generative AI and other emerging technologies were added with the help of domain experts from industry and academia from around the world. Embedding Code School's suggested learning outcomes into the National Curriculum was the first step in ensuring that every child in Pakistan, regardless of background or geography, gains access to foundational coding skills as part of their formal education.

The Teacher Problem

The bottleneck isn't just curriculum. It’s teachers.

In most schools, the people assigned to teach coding don’t actually know how to code. And the people who do know how to code aren’t in the classroom.

Code School flipped this model by recruiting programmers, even computer science students, and training them to teach. Not the other way around. This approach has built a scalable, gig-based instructor pipeline that now delivers live coding classes to children in over 20 countries.

Proof It Works: Slums and Silicon Valley

In one Karachi pilot, children of domestic workers who had never used a computer and spoke little English were taught the same curriculum as students in the Netherlands. The learning outcomes were identical. The only difference was access.

Children from resource scare neighborhoods are not less capable of learning coding. They can learn whatever is taught to them.

They’ve just been systematically denied the opportunity to prove themselves. When the right curriculum, language, and support meet a child, any child, where they are, the results speak for themselves.

What’s Next

There’s still more to do. Low-resource environments come with unique challenges: patchy internet, limited English fluency, and outdated hardware if any at all. Code School is now focused on training local teachers, translating curricula, and creating offline-compatible content so that coding education doesn’t remain the privilege of a few.

The Takeaway

The world is increasingly defined by artificial intelligence. But without building the capacity for human intelligence, we risk deepening the divide between those who shape the future and those who are shaped by it.

Coding is no longer optional. It is the literacy we forgot to teach. And it’s time we fixed that.