You Have Their Attention.
Use it to teach them the truth.
You have the power to shape how a generation thinks about building for the web. You're probably wasting it.
What You're Actually Teaching
Framework Dependence
Your students can build a React app. They cannot build a website.
Give them npx create-react-app and they'll feel like wizards. Give them a raw HTML file and they'll panic.
You've taught them to be dependent. That's not education—that's addiction.
Complexity as Competence
Your curriculum treats simple code as "junior" and complex code as "senior."
This is backwards. It takes more skill to simplify. It takes more knowledge to know what to omit.
Your "senior" students ship 2MB bundles. Your "junior" students can ship 2KB pages that actually load.
The "Industry Standard" Myth
You teach "what the industry uses." The industry uses what it uses because someone picked something 10 years ago and now we're all stuck with it.
You're not teaching best practices. You're teaching inertia.
What You Could Teach Instead
Forms that submit. Links that navigate. Semantics that matter.
JavaScript should enhance, not enable. It should be optional, not required.
If it doesn't load, it doesn't work. Fast is not optional.
Custom elements. Shadow DOM. The actual web platform.
Done is better than perfect. Simple is better than complex. Working is better than clever.
For Course Creators
You make money teaching people to code. What are you actually giving them?
"Build 10 projects in 10 hours"
Your students can copy-paste React components. They cannot build anything from scratch.
"Learn the MERN stack in a weekend"
Your students can type `npm install`. They don't understand what npm is or why it exists.
"Full-stack mastery"
Your students know 5 frameworks. They don't know the platform any of them run on.
You're selling credentials, not education. You keep them dependent so they keep paying.
For Academics
You have research funding. You have graduate students. You have legitimacy.
You're publishing papers on "microservices patterns" and "event-driven architectures" while the fundamental platform—the web—is being destroyed by the very complexity you should be fighting.
Research question: Why does loading a blog post require downloading 1MB of JavaScript?
Research question: Why is the web getting slower as computers get faster?
Research question: Who benefits from the web being broken?
Your students are building things that don't need to exist. Your research is solving problems that shouldn't exist.
You Have Power
Every student who learns to build without frameworks is a student who understands the platform. Every course that teaches HTML first is a course that respects the web.
You could be the reason someone builds something that actually matters. Something that loads. Something that lasts.
Or you could keep teaching them to npm install.
Start at the Beginning →