Having worked in 1:1 schools and seen phone use / laptop has in the classroom this seems a step in the right direction. Tech is not the answer to everything in education it is just a useful tool that can and should be used from time to time like. Like a calculator but a more versatile.
What we have in many classrooms is a tech nightmare where tasks are digitized for just the sake of digitizing and attention span is lost, deep learning and concentration is lost and meaning relationships between student / student or student / instructor are diminished.
> What we have in many classrooms is a tech nightmare where tasks are digitized for just the sake of digitizing
I am glad that my child has been able to go to a school that only uses computers for tasks that can't practically be done otherwise (CAD for 3d printing, move editing, etc). Everyting else has been analog. Real books, real paper, writing by hand (cursive, even). Zero cell phones in elementary school by any kid. This is in silicon valley, so every kid has one or both parents in tech, so there is broad understanding of how problematic it is to let it dominate over the real world.
Recently I got in to mechanical typewriters for writing. I really like them! It's fascinating to have a machine which has no apps, no screen, no internal memory, and no distractions. You don't even have to "print" your page after writing it as the printing and the typing are the same operation.
The other day I was writing poetry at my computer and I had a Slack message pop up. I immediately clicked on it and responded, and then I went back to my poem and had totally lost my train of thought.
I am not suggesting schools use typewriters, but I wonder if there is value in considering limited functionality devices for specific classes in schools and similar situations.
During the process of replacing old processes with new ones, it’s hard to know what aspects of the traditional process (in this case, books and writing) are more valuable than understood. It seems like we are making a step in the right direction, but I wonder how we will prevent ourselves from making this and similar mistakes in the future.
> I wonder how we will prevent ourselves from making this and similar mistakes in the future
Just listen to the teachers, parents, and students. In high school I was among the last year groups to be pen and paper. All the younger students had laptops and iPads. I distinctly remember during the change that very few people thought it was a good idea, except for those students who got a free laptop or iPad out of it. I imagine the change was mostly brought about by administrators and politicians.
It's not the tech itself that is the problem, and I think viewing it as the problem would lead one to miss a key trio of problems, that is equally applicable to books.
The problem has three interrelated parts: a) we do not value developing the capacity to think, b) the ability to think is not valued (by whom? I'm not quite sure), and c) we do not value doing things slowly.
a) Most have the mistaken notion that the capacity to think is fixed with respect to various biological factors. Putting aside whether the biology truly does fix this (I do not know enough here) the fact remains that this misses that there exist tools which can help us organize our thinking so that it appears to be "better". Examples of this are plenty in mathematics, where the symbolic "language" you use alone can make a massive difference to your "ability" to deal with a problem.
Some tools are more like internal narratives: if one develops a narrative that isn't constantly judging whether they are "thinking fast enough" or are "being productive enough" they ironically end up thinking more effectively.
(For examples of people interested in making such tools better known:
And some tools are simply more biological: a person in good physical health can think more clearly than a person for whom this is not true, for the simple reason of nutrient supply to the brain being more efficient in the former than the latter.
There's also what our culture tends to portray in entertainment. Contrary to what other think, I think entertainment is not harmless enjoyment due to the nature of our brain: as far as I know, there is no good way to consciously choose the weights you are applying to various inputs, while receiving that input (unless, ironically, you have training). Advertisers realize this, which is why "product placement", or "paid" narrative tweaking (presenting a story that is "cleaned up") work.
But more importantly, our entertainment industry does a terrible job of showing what is actually beautiful and exciting about problems in the real world. Instead, it defaults to shooting bullets, and adrenaline driven excitement. In a "biopic" about a scientist, it cares not about the immense beauty of their patient struggles, or what habits they purposefully cultivated in order to think more effectively, and instead prefers to view their achievements through a dramatic lens of romance and "lightning bolts of inspiration".
It is just as easy to put such entertain in the form of a book (e.g. Sherlock Holmes).
b) my contention that the ability to think is not valued, and perhaps actively devalued, is due to the fact that people are very willing to pollute information highways and entertainment feeds, in order to make profits. They are willing to distract people constantly from things they would prefer to be doing. They are willing to interrupt with needless reminders and notifications. They are willing to use Skinner Boxes to keep a person engaged regardless of what their conscious mind is interested in. Most importantly, they are willing to pay thoughtful people to figure out the best ways to do this: https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...
This is why technology is so disruptive. It is not usually designed to prioritize our ability to think, but is instead designed for other purposes. Which common place operating can you point to which has in-built tools to help a person manage over-use, or help a person track their time usage, or help someone stick to their goals around usage, or provides notifications in order to help a person get back on task? How many Skinner Boxes exist that around getting people to stick it out over the long term and engage with difficult material? (Most mathematics textbooks would be better as games.)
None. The issue could equally exist with, and without books. Dilution of quality of information, misinformation, de-focusing information: none of those ideas are tied to a particular medium.
c) To create something new that is truly valuable is time consuming. You cannot be overly prideful and expect to just "disrupt" things. You need to understand fairly well what the old process was, and work with people who use the old process. Perhaps even hire them as parts of the product-testing loop. You need to spend time thinking about the design, or employ people who are willing to do this. You need to spend time maintaining things, rather than just making the next new thing, yet you also need to be able to realize that "backwards compatibility" is not productive for humanity (who does backwards compatibility truly serve well? why are their wants prioritized).
None of these are ideas that are common in tech. So, the products the tech industry produces are for $$$ are overall, pretty likely to be garbage. But again, there is nothing unique about this to technology as it stands today: mass production, thoughtless production...these can be problems in any industry, and are problems in other industries too (e.g. the building industry).
I don't think the students will do better only because they are spending more time handwriting or reading books.
As a Swede with toddlers (2 and 3 years old) in preschool I salute this. Preschools are required by law to use tablets in the "education" of toddlers, which is completely insane since more and more research are saying that using screens as a small child might disturb cognitive development.
Call me old school but I think toddlers should play with sticks and balls.
Side note: the general view in Sweden is that the school is working terrible and many parents do all they can to teach their young childs to read, write and count because they don't trust the school system to do that for them. I think it's great to teach your kids as much as you can, but it's a bit sad that the reason is this one.
> the general view in Sweden is that the school is working terrible
It's quite universal to find that schools in your own country are terrible :)
Having lived (and raised children) in multiple countries, I can tell you I've never seen a country where people would say good things about their own education systems
Not sure why... probably simply because everybody has (good !) ideas on how it could be better, but they are not easy to implement ! :). Probably also because that's really something people care about
Yes, my childrens preschool was awesome but at the same time I did wonder why the need for tablets at such a young age. One reason stated was that it was a matter of equality, parents who could not afford tech means their children are at a disadvantage later on when they dont know how to use... touchscreens I guess? :)
while i do agree mindless screen time on children is/may be damaging; i think there is a huge difference in using a tablet/laptop as a modern version of a notebook vs. using to watch Youtube Kids with Ads in between etc.
My guess is it's not technology per se that's the problem but that it gets used primarily to make the teacher's life easier and substitute for them giving lessons and feedback.
Also, ed-tech built by the lowest bidder is always going to be crap. Imagine "learning" as a kid in the same way that corporate training is done.
I think this is the right move, even if it's technically solvable to provide good tech-heavy education, I don't see it as practically possible.
> “We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy,” said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research.
Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
> it's not technology per se that's the problem
That said, handwriting practice is correlated to developing fine motor skills, which are documented to be in decline in children in a number of countries. Excessive time with (touch)screens is terrible on that front.
My son could print perfectly legibly about age 7, then the schools tarted forcing letter shapes that were far harder to read with loops and smears etc.
His handwriting then devolved into a spidery mess which was impossible to read, which meant that marks started slipping.
Joined up handwriting is a disgusting unrequired curse on society. If you want to do "beautiful calligraphy" (unreadable scrawl) that's fine, have an optional class.
I think what they might be implying is that electronics make it very easy for teachers to rely on potentially inaccurate sources on the internet. Rather than that there aren't vetted sources that are acceptable to use (there probably are).
I somewhat tend to agree, assuming that the quality of teachers in Sweden is comparable to my own experience. In hindsight many teachers I had (especially for earlier grades) weren't likely to be better than the average rando taken off the street when it comes to vetting the material they use.
Only upon getting to university did it finally seem like the free/open source materials some professors liked to use were vetted.
> Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
Maybe to train the kids in vetting materials themselves? Seems like an important skill. It's incredible that in school you're never confronted two contradictory sources of information and have to decide which is right.
All of school is structured around the fact that there is about one teacher per 30 students. Of course teachers will use tech as a way to reduce their own burnout. We know how to make a much better school: more competent teachers and more of them, ideally so that each student has a ton of one-on-one time with teachers daily. Whether books are paper or writing is by hand is really insignificant consideration compared to all the other shortcomings of school.
Thankfully every student will soon have a very knowledgeable, perfectly patient and available teacher: ChatGPT. At first I was skeptical schools will use them, since they don't tend to understand technology very well, but I think some schools will see the potential to relieve the pressure on their teachers and others will follow when they see the positive outcomes for students.
If allowed, ChatGPT will also allow teachers to spend less time on administrative tasks, which is one of the reasons why they're so burned out in the first place.
> My guess is it's not technology per se that's the problem but that it gets used primarily to make the teacher's life easier and substitute for them giving lessons and feedback
I think this is highly likely given what they are cutting back on is “independent online research.”
For me, writing on paper provides insights that I just don’t get from a computer.
Writing outside the lines, doodles and swirls on the edges as I ruminate. Adding geometric borders around certain areas, arrows pointing at important things. Leaning in to add a tiny side-note…
I still always program at work with paper and pen on one side of my keyboard. It’s a bit like a mental clipboard for me. It also gives me another reason to get my eyes off the screen for a bit.
Interestingly I’ve never found writing helpful. I do better typing out my thoughts and writing samples etc. I’ve really tried because people who find writing useful have such great experiences. I even took copious notes in school because everyone said how useful it was. I never referred to them and eventually stopped and just paid close attention. I don’t whiteboard, I don’t jot down ideas, I am just able to keep things in cache and render them in documents, code, and diagrams. I think different minds work differently.
My challenge with standardized learning models is they work for those they work for, and cut down and ground down those it doesn’t. Then the beneficiaries write the rules for the next generation oblivious to the possibility that their experience isn’t the only one. I really struggled in American public school which is rife with learning style assumptions. I really hope a time comes when neurodiversity is accepted in public education, but until then I’ll keep sending my daughter to a private school that adopts a differentiated teaching style.
That's such a cool thing the way you describe it. I honestly wish I was that way. But for me, my most direct connection to expressing thought is a keyboard connected to a capable text editor. I remember trying to take notes by hand in college, and finding that it was easier for me to type in org-mode (mainly so I could write equations in latex, but not deal with latex outside of that).
I've never been a person who doodles. I may underline or highlight, but that's about it. I keep trying hand journaling and handwritten note taking. I'm not particularly slow or sloppy, but it just doesn't click the same way as the keyboard.
It's been a few years since I had to deal with a coworker who likes to draw random stuff on a board or a piece of paper, insisting that it is essential for everyone to watch. I never do, as I have learned that guys like this consistently provide the worst explanations because they tend to focus on their drawings, which they like.
I realise this isn't what you said, of course. Maybe you don't do this.
I wonder what actually moving your hand to draw the characters does for the brain and associating the characters meaning. I definitely feel writing by hand is more intimate and it’s easier to think, but I’m a lot slower to write and my hand cramps often.
This is the niche that the ReMarkable tablett is trying to fill - all* of the interface benefits of paper, and all* of the syncing/etc benefits of digitization.
I don't personally own one, but one thing that the ReMarkable tablet fails to do is replicate the speed of flipping through paper. It's still somewhat slow.
As long as schools allow to store books in their buildings...
I keep seeing (in Europe) kids with school bags full of notebooks and books that easily weight 4-5 KG. That's not healthy. The problem I see is that kids have homework that require the books at home, but then teachers use the books at classroom... so, they need to carry them here and there.
That’s not unhealthy, that’s good! Carry a moderately heavy bag to and from school is hardly difficult, or shouldn’t be, and that sort of weight will be from larger books meaning older children anyway. We have an obesity crisis in most countries - now is not the time to worry about older children/teenagers carrying a couple kilos for a short period each day.
I cannot remember a single person complaining about a heavy rucksack when I was in school a decade ago - by 13 we had CCF so had to go hiking with much heavier bags on the weekends. At 15.5 you can join the military schools and you’ll be carrying 25kg. This shouldn’t be a worry unless you’re physically disabled or something. Duke of Edinburgh involves hiking 13k a day with all your camping equipment and food at 12 years old over a weekend. Etc…
You'll not solve obesity by forcing them to carry books. On the other hand you can create some deformations on their spinal cord, esp if weight is not distributed correctly.
If you want to solve obesity, invest in education about healthy food and how to cook it, since usually bad food is the reason or extra calories
For the first several years (here in Silicon Valley, CA) my kids had little to no content in their school bags (grades K-4). Then they had some stuff and we thought it'd be best if they got roller bags. Now they're in middle school and the roller bags are full and weigh 10kg+ it seems. Insane. I want them to ride their bikes to school but with this weight it would only happen with rear-racks and panniers. Sigh.
Do they actually need everything? Some kids tend to hoard all their school papers when it could be cleaned out and put in an archive binder/folder at home.
Does the curriculum require they carry textbooks in daily?
If we take a young child weighting 20-30 kg, 5 kg would be 1/4th to 1/6th of body mass... 15-20 kg or 10-15kg carried daily by adult is not a light load. And children have less developed bodies.
How will you study books or notes for homework, if they are at school? I admit that we had a lot of school books to carry when I was young and I occasionally got a sore neck from lugging them around, but I wouldn't call it especially unhealthy. You anyway don't have that many school books until ages 13 and up here (Finland), and by that time you are perfectly capable of carrying things.
Usually this could be solved with a "home copy" for each kid, then "classroom copies" for kids to use in class. Kids still carry their notes, but those weigh a small fraction of what hardback textbooks do.
Personally I found soldering taught me fine motor control. But my family has genetically bad hand writing being a bunch of surgeons - who can’t write worth a damn but have super human fine motor control.
I would note of the things you listed: pen, paper, good teacher, almost all the alpha is associated with the teacher. And while the pen and the paper can be bought, a good teacher is only born.
I have excellent fine motor control in both hands. I can use knives, a mouse, scissors or solder with either hand, yet I have struggled- suffered!- with handwriting since forever.
Handwriting is one of those things I seem to have an argument with my son (he’s 10). And it isn’t about him having that specific skill. But it’s about having a sense of pride in your work and not half-assing things.
But my wife and I struggle to get anyone to agree with us. The teachers don’t seem to care (which my son is happy to relay to me).
Other parents say why bother, it’s an outdated skill (I actually disagree, even though my handwriting is often bad from lack of practice, when I do fill up forms by hand, I understand the importance of legibility).
But again, to me it is symptomatic of a larger issue where I feel that more and more, kids are not taught to have a sense or standard in the quality of their work and improve upon it, regardless of the particular skill.
I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.
Am I alone in this? Looking for a good counterpoint.
You one-sidedly pick a skill for someone else, that they don't enjoy and don't find useful and that you can't reasonably justify as being useful.
Then you insist that they do it well.
But that's not enough - you also insist that they have to want to do it well.
Which you also can't justify, other than very abstractly, by insisting that everything they do - including things they didn't choose themselves, don't care about, don't find useful and won't actually find useful - they should want to do well.
I'd be more worried for someone who didn't find that preposterous.
Being able to hold a pen in your hand and write a note that looks legible is a fundamental skill. One should be able to write a message on a card that does not make the recipient want to puke or at least wonder if whether the author survived what looks like an obvious stroke. It’s a matter of self respect.
>I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.
You aren't alone, but I think this is terrible advice. You should figure out what you want to do and find the best way to do it. The best way will probably involve half-assing a lot of stuff, since you only have a finite amount of time/energy.
I had a teacher at school who used to say "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing properly", but he mainly said it about things that weren't worth doing.
Relating to this, a big realization for me was in highschool when I was given the advice by an elder sibling that I didn't need to try to do everything perfectly if I had other important things to do. Eg. it's okay to take a small hit on one class's grade by skipping a weekly homework assignment if it means being able to focus on the term end project from another class.
In hindsight it seems kind of obvious, but I was so used to the parental pressure to just do everything perfectly from my earlier years that it had never occurred to me to prioritize. Although I suppose it does still require you to have a mature sense of priorities, since skipping all assignments to party every day is obviously not healthy.
I take pride in all of my work, but at this point, as a PhD student, if I put my 100% into everything, I'd have to forgo even sleep. I have to figure out which tasks are more important and which I can hand off to others or simply ignore because my supervisor probably won't even remember asking me to do them in a week.
> "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing properly"
Big life lesson for me was "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing poorly" Even if it's more worthwhile doing it a little better (and once done poorly you can work toward that if it makes sense).
Is it terrible advice? Those are quite strong words. I don't think it is terrible. It may not be for everyone but I can surely see that such a philosophy and approach to life can be fulfilling. I think it can make you focus, do less but do it better. Quality over quantity, kind of.
In my opinion handwriting is as useless a skill as is possible. I never use my handwriting - ever. I likewise don’t churn butter, do arithmetic beyond what I can do in my head, or card yarn for my clothes.
There is nothing redeeming about artisanal hand scripting other than writing annotations on objects to label them, and even then a label maker does a better job in every dimension. Typing is a fundamental skill in the modern world, and type written text is not just considerably more legible, it’s also indexable for search etc.
Having a sense of pride is often coupled with a sense of utility and purpose. Few people feel pride in useless exercises done for rote purposes and celebration of the way it was done in the past. Some certainly do, and god bless them. But I feel more pride in my code than artisanal scribbles, in my handiwork, in my learning, etc. Kids are no different. Maybe they feel pride in their Minecraft creations. Is a complex red stone build with intricate visual designs and creative use in game not more compelling and interesting than manipulating a wood stick to make glyphs? A lot of people think the things a kid takes pride in aren’t worth taking pride in, and instead try to make them take pride in something from their own childhood.
They are misidentifying a lack of interest in your interests with a lack of pride in their work.
I grew up entirely pre-smartphone, so my education was mostly handwriting except a couple typed papers a year (and then even more handwriting in college—oh, the hand cramps on tests).
A couple months ago I had to write about five sentences by hand, and it dawned on me that that single act was probably twice as much handwriting as I’d done the entire prior two years, not counting signatures and such.
I don’t think you’re alone. And I appreciate your arguments. They’re valid, even if I disagree.
My perspective is that there is an ever growing wealth of knowledge and skills and only so much time in the day. We see this conflict in some hardcore parents who sign their kids up for an entire childhood of studies.
I think it’s deeply important to have pride in your work and to do it carefully, patiently, methodically. I’m not sure this must be practiced with any specific skill.
I think doctors are an example of how this can be at odds with reality. Do they not take pride in their work, or do they have just so much to study that they cannot afford the expense?
I think it’s also important to identify that this discussion often conflates two things: cursive handwriting and legible printing. I believe schools still endeavour to teach kids to print legibly.
It is a well-established fact that the mechanical act of handwriting notes is good for memorization. Perhaps it is meditative, perhaps we're just physical beings -- whatever it is, typewriting on a computer is not as good.
A famous man whose name I forget once said "Plans are useless, planning is indispensable," and I would like to paraphrase it as "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."
> "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."
This is very, very true for me. I read, optimistically, 5% of my notes.
As a corollary, I’m unable to take notes if the notepad is too fancy. I get analysis paralysis from something like a moleskine, like something this nice deserves nicely formatted notes. Only cheapo gas station notpads work for me.
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others
See my other post in this discussion for a link to Kate Gladstone's site and as well as SE Briem's list of calligraphy texts.
A touchstone for me on this is John Quincy Adams' translation of Wieland's Oberon:
My third-grader here in digital Sweden started "Sloyd" woodworking class this month. Thanks for sharing these links.
The kids all have their own iPads in the classroom but they seem to be used very sparingly, mostly for extra drills occupying kids who finish their handwriting-heavy schoolwork early.
> And it isn’t about him having that specific skill. But it’s about having a sense of pride in your work and not half-assing things.
Maybe you'd have more luck teaching him the latter if you focused on skills/work that are clearly useful. Or useful to him atleast even if you disagree that handwriting is outdated.
Take pride in your work and doing it well is a useful lesson (and unfortunately not something I'm great at personally) but if he doesn't see any value in that specific work he'll never even comprehend the difference between work done well and work half-assed, never mind strive for it. All he see's is you asking him to put more effort into a pointless activity.
I reckon this is one of the reasons that sports and arts are relatively successful at teaching kids life skills like discipline. It's easier for kids to see the immediate value of being good at those than other skills, so their more motivated and lessons stick.
My son was in a school that taught English via immersion (they hired English teachers who couldn't even speak any German).
Starting with grade 1 the kids wrote exclusively with fountain pens, and were marked early on on penmanship. Except in English, where they were allowed to write with pencils or biros so of course they did because it was a change, and the teachers didn't seem to care about penmanship at all.
Two decades later his writing with a fountain pen in any language is as clear as a bell, while anything else results in a scrawl. I don't believe it's because the tool is superior in some way, I think it's simply the attention to detail got wired in.
==
An amusing nerd side point: In grade 1 they learnt a letter a week, and from that were reading by xmas. To avoid confusing the kids, English was supposed to use "German letterforms" but really they are pretty much the same! Anyway the funny thing is that in English they start the first week with "A" (Apple, Ant), then "B" (Banana, Buffalo) and so on. German was taught in the alphabetic frequency order: "E" (Elefant), then "N" (Nase), "I" (Igel) and so on. Disappointingly, Christmas came before they got to ß as I was curious what they would do (no word starts with it).
I think there is something very different about handwriting than typing. Like, listen to a lecture and write notes on a pad, and then go to the lecture the next day and type them on a computer.
Then, wait a week, and take a test without reviewing anything.
My money, based on my experience, is on you better remembering the handwritten notes. I think this is because you cannot write as fast as you type, so you have to hear, think about what is important, and summarize when handwriting. When typing, you can get almost all the words someone says typed out. So you switch to "hear-to-type" mode without thinking.
So, I think it is important for learning to have that skill. I think it is better in the real world too, for some use cases. If I am in a meeting with a counterparty, I take hand written notes. I rarely look at the notes after. Why? I remember what we talked about.
I used to bring a computer and type out notes - and I still do if I need perfect information to reference later - but when I do that, my notes take the place of my memory.
It seems more efficient to handwrite my notes and have my memory be my memory instead.
Research has shown that writing notes by hand leads to better retention than typing even if the notes are never read in the future. However, given that writing is just 7000 years old, I'm not sure how long will it take before typing to become the more natural skill (if typing does last for 7000 years that is)
I think your focus on kaligraphy is damaging to the lesson. You should pick something your son values, and teach him to drive it to perfection. Then watch him getting annoyed when you half-ass it in front of him.
All education is a crude attempt at telepathy and while repeated confrontation can transport the value you place upon a thing, it does not make it intrinsic.
Also skills are filtered for right to exist every generation. Skills become value less is a normal and even healthy thing.
it's a child. By definition it doesn't know what it values. This has seemingly been forgotten but parents have a mentorship and guiding role. Their job is to cultivate in their children interest in activities in the first place. When I was young I hated that my parents made me learn an instrument, because I wanted to play video games and eat ice cream all day. As an adult (who became a part time musician) I understand the value of it.
"do what your son wants' gets you children raised on an ipad with no education in the arts.
Handwriting is like drawing or music. Do you absolutely need it? No. But it is another mode of operation, that develops brain. Arguably, reading and writing/typing may become obsolete with next decade or two, thanks to voice interface enhanced by NN models.
I doubt that reading/writing/typing will be replaced by speech. You simply can't speak or listen anywhere near as fast as you can do any of those things.
There are other features about a piece of homework than how the handwriting appears. Is the content high quality? Did he learn? Did he do it efficiently? Did he enjoy doing it? Is it well-designed or beautiful in other ways? Etc. Your kid can feel pride about these other features of his work, some of which may be mutually exclusive with high quality handwriting! Selecting the handwriting as high priority is somewhat arbitrary on your part. I'd be concerned that you're overlooking other arguably more important signals of pride and joy in your kid's work by focusing on this one.
If you want your kid to practice high quality craftsmanship, to feel pride in a job well-done, let him choose another craft where the quality is inherently relevant, like woodworking or sewing (or calligraphy)!
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A second angle. Imagine you are trying to learn to write code and someone insisted you use a difficult keyboard: each key is a different size, they're spaced out across the desk facing different directions. (Or, say, insisted you use punch cards). You'll surely have a harder time learning to code!
You only have a limited number of hours in life to devote to acquiring mastery, and there's a nearly unlimited number of subjects that are worth mastering.
Instead of trying to be good at everything you're doing, decide what you're going to be good at, what you're going to outsource and half-ass, and work towards being good at the former, while getting by/paying other people to do with the latter.
You need to take pride in something, but you're fooling yourself if you think you can do everything well - or that its a good investment of your time.
Maybe instead of forcing him to become an expert at a skill with incredibly poor return on investment, you should drive him towards becoming an expert at... Writing.
>But again, to me it is symptomatic of a larger issue where I feel that more and more, kids are not taught to have a sense or standard in the quality of their work and improve upon it, regardless of the particular skill.
You mean so they can work 60 hours for a mediocre salary with little upwards mobility that won't even let them buy a house anymore while sinking in student debt?
Knowing when work for the sake of work is a waste of your life is a very important skill now that you can't walk into a random company Monday morning and come out with a job
I haven't seen the phrase 'critical thinking' in a long time. The concept of a standard has dropped, though kids are exposed to much more generalized criticism online than we were in school.
You can post anything online and get global feedback (at least in theory, people are silo-ing more everyday). You can see others get harsh feedback. There's youtube channels dedicated to tearing apart X Y and Z products for their flaws.
Unfortunately the internet returns most people to the mean or average, within a bell curve. There's some incredible knowledge online, but it's not enough to replace a critical university teacher leaning over your shoulder, or working under a master craftsman and enduring his continual destruction of your failed attempts. Standards are hard won.
Holding an internal standard and conscience has been subverted upvotes/downvotes and by the internet in general, in my view.
Hypotheticaly subtract internet points and approval seeking from the online world, and you'll see the idea of a individual standard re-emerge, I bet.
Edit: Handwriting is super important. Typing on keyboards has an arbitrary mapping between action and outcome. Handwriting directly connects your muscles and mind together and gives permenancy to your handiwork that forces consideration. I keep a diary, by hand. I cross out mistakes and initial them. Best habit in my life, would not trade it for the world. Any serious thoughts I need to 'get out' or improve, go there.
I hated writing as a kid. I think part of the problem was that my thoughts were much faster than my pen, so I by default wrote as fast as I could. If I tried to write more legibly, my writing would still look poor compared to many others, and I'd have to slow to a fraction of the speed, so why bother? For instance, whenever I have to write my email address on a form (you know, it has to be perfectly legible or you won't receive your email), and half the letters still look like trash.
Counterpoint: Pareto principle. For 20% of effort you get 80% of results, so you are better of 1/5ing-assing 2 things for a total of less than half the effort and more than 50% more gains.
Your grandfathers advice might have been sane back in the day when you could only do one or two things and so quickly hit diminishing returns, but today it does not matter greatly.
More emotional argument. What do you call the person who does more than they get rewarded for (over a long time?): a sucker. And who wants to be a sucker?
I once saw a documentary about Nelson Mandela. When he read a newspaper he was very careful to line up the pages and to crease the paper so it was straight and had even corners between the different pages. He did not half-ass the act of turning pages in a newspaper. It seemed like such a waste of time. How much less must he have had time to read, wasting time to turn pages like that?
On the other hand he had an incredible reputation and was admired as a leader across the world. Perhaps his attention to detail mattered even when it seemed like a waste.
Handwriting is one of the easiest methods by which you can practice fine motor skills and manual dexterity.
Also, I really enjoy watching a thought literally flow out of my body onto a page. There is something very disconnected about pressing keys on a keyboard to see the words appear on a screen -- sometimes I find myself in a state of flow on a computer where it all seems to 'click', but contrast that with handwriting and I can get right into flow the instant graphite or ink meets paper.
I have recently seen some children work out things (mechanics, strategies, communication) to perfection in video games. They are incredibly perceptive critics of their own and other's performance.
They are probably much better than your grandfather at both game and meta-game, because they are standing on the shoulders of slightly larger people. They are familiar with the conventions and input methods and community and thus have a base understanding that few older people do.
Funny I used to use this argument when people used to complain to me about video games. They can be incredibly complex and utilize your brain in amazing ways.
And I actually have zero issues with him playing video games. The sports ones involve building your team, trading players, etc. That's all pretty complex stuff.
This is my own personal bias talking here but I think handwriting might be a poor subject to teach the wider lesson of taking pride in your work. My hand writing has always been terrible. It was a big deal 30 years ago (when I was at school) - it's not really been an issue since. But it's not whether it's outdated or not, it's just not something which easily improves with practice (at least, in my experience). Even when I spent a lot of time and energy trying to slowly draw individual letters the end result was still messy.
My problem was exacerbated because I sat next to a kid who was a great artist. He used to draw comic strips (at age 9-10) and the lettering looked professional (at least to my eyes). Yes if I had spent an enormous amount of time and effort I could have improved my handwriting but I don't think I'd ever be able to produce 1/5th the quality of what he did. My hand just wasn't (and isn't) that steady.
With other subjects you can spend a lot less time and improve quality a lot easier and faster. With something like code layout it's much easier to brute force tidiness in a way that just isn't possible with handwriting (or drawing).
Your son could have dysgraphia. My son (14, homeschooled) struggles with writing, and it was hard to not think of his poor writing as a result of him being lazy or not caring.
My kids have gone to a Montessori school since pre-K and those schools teach handwriting. It's not done because of how much or little the student will use that handwriting later in life but more because, early on, it helps develop fine motor skills.
Now that they're in high school, my daughter has excellent penmanship. My son... not so much. :) But! He can do it.
An alternative hypothesis is that it's done because it has always been done, and the fine motor skills thing is merely an attempt to rationalize this practice.
Depends what profession you end up pursuing. If your son pursues computer science then likely never need to use handwriting ever again. As a 10+ year software engineer I've never needed to handwrite anything professionally, not once. Personally, still like to do the occasional handwritten card or letter for friends and family.
Rather than argue about this, perhaps it may be better to see if you can get your son to be interested in practicing calligraphy, where the whole point of the exercise is to write in beautiful way. Otherwise, you're trying to win an argument about something that is often tangential to another goal.
You and I both have terrible handwriting. In my life, it hasn't been a hindrance to my work as a software engineer so maybe your son has a point. However, I do agree that doing things well has merit but maybe reframing it will get you farther along this goal. And lastly, maybe you can achieve the same goal through other means? Perhaps in playing an instrument or practicing some other skill. I think the value you want to teach your son is practicing something and doing it well. It doesn't need to be handwriting.
>I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.
This seems fairly contradictory to me. He's not choosing to do it, he's forced to learn some outdated skill. Let him excel in some useful skill, like mathematics.
45 here. I certainly didn't and don't appreciate the fact that I spent hours on Saturdays improving my cursive during early education because my writing was horrible unless I took too long to do it. I envy the younger generations.
I don't think it's a generational thing. I think it varies by family. Neither my parents nor grandparents really pushed that kind of message even though they were very focused on education. My family is Jewish-American and still have strong cultural memory of being deliberately excluded from opportunities despite effort. I absorbed it as a dual mandate to learn as much as possible and to play whatever game the schools needed you to play to get recognition.
I also had terrible handwriting despite tons of experience. Meanwhile I knew kids who wrote like typewriters from the 4th grade just due to natural talent.
Pick something more impactful. It's hard to have a sense of pride for something that will be read once and promptly shredded. Maybe share examples of how having good penmanship has helped you?
I have a good hand and enjoy writing with the gel 0.5.
Cursive was drilled into me as a child.
I will still take notes and write my thoughts out on paper. It somehow manages to provide me focus and shut out distractions. It’s also a space I can do a lot of free form thinking and tie things together.
Assists shouldn’t be given at an early age. I believe they are counter productive.
Another example. We never used calculators till 11th grade. All calculations had to be done by hand. I can still quickly approximate to know if numbers are in the ballpark.
Everything I do in my work (Software Engineering) is about just getting it done/ getting v1.0 over the line. Not my choice, but leadership don't seem to care about things being done well so long as they're done.
Can you provide him with an example, such as a work notebook with notes taken during a meeting, or while thinking through a problem? Or a handwritten letter/card received from a close friend/partner.
Teachers don't care about handwriting anymore because handwriting is not part of standardized testing, and that is how schools and teachers are evaluated now.
Cursive handwriting was not optional, same for spelling.
Teachers would flunk people and no, there are no repeats at that school.
From 200 in kinder, only 70 finished HS
You are on the right side, find people who give a damn about education.
One advantage of giving kids laptops for schoolwork is that we won't be training a generation that can't touch-type
I am a bit serious here though, gone are the days where you were expected to learn computer skills at home. Most people don't use laptops all that much in the same manner millennials used to use desktops. So we are growing in a generation where people prefer to use touchpads instead of mouses and can't touch-type, hampering the productivity of these people unless they train themselves out of it. They have little reason to do so because it is not a 100% difference, more like a 5-30% difference depending on task
Funnily enough there is an argument to be made that a lot of millennials and older can't swipe-type in touch devices which is also valid!
I'm usually looking at people when they type on keyboards. When I was young (1985) most people that had to type, knew how to touch type. Then came a phase where it was hunt and peck when the computers showed up and everyone had to use them for work. Later you were expected to at least know the finger position even though you look at the keyboard while typing.
But I haven't had opportunity to see much people typing for a while until last year. Just last week I saw two people working at a bank not able to type numbers on the numpad without looking and using one finger. Both of them around 25. The optician could not touch type, was using a fast version of hunt and peck with three fingers total. Also around 25. But the dentists and doctors could touch-type pretty fast. All of them 40 - 60. (I started working as a personal assistant part time so see a lot of medical people, Sweden)
I don't wish they'd bring back cursive; I wish they would teach shorthand. If I would have learned shorthand in the 2nd grade, it would have made every single class I took after that better, because I could have taken much better notes.
I know Teeline shorthand, which is easier to learn than Gregg shorthand. It is fine for taking note from books or articles, but not quite fast enough to take notes from spoken language.
Interesting. My parents did all my handwriting practice when I was a child so that I could go out and play. Our school graded on exams and labs alone which I aced. My handwriting remained rubbish as I aced my undergraduate program, remained rubbish as I started work in software, and has remained rubbish as I've climbed from success to success.
Contra-other-posts, I don't think I would have learned anything of value from handwriting. Perhaps my exam scores would have been higher as some things weren't misunderstood.
I also relied on zero notes during lectures, instead finding that close attention lead to near complete recall in class, but I suffered when I tried taking notes as an experiment. My Algebraic Geometry class was a complete disaster.
Ideally, if I had to make tradeoffs, my children would be like me: with good alphanumeric and concept recall from memory. I think it is superior to note-taking.
I want my daughter (aged four) to enjoy writing by hand. It's part creative, part practical, but I also think that humans have a connection to the physical act of making things, or marks, that will take a (very) long time to go away, and that we will yearn for if we stop.
That said, I love making things, drawing, painting etc, but have terrible handwriting, and mostly hate doing it! My teachers never let me get my "pen licence", so to this day I much prefer a mechanical pencil.
Hasn't it been proved as well that writing things out by hand is the most effective way to memorize things? Wouldn't all schools want to teach this valuable tool to students?
I am a scientist and over the last years I stopped using notebooks for notes... I lost something, you connect deeper with your thoughts by writing with hand. Now I occasionally use A3 papers when I see need, but still. I will take a notebook tomorrow!
I haven't looked into this, just responding intuitively, but aren't we trained to learn better by writing by hand because of our upbringing. If the next generation stops hand writing and starts typing from early childhood education, wouldn't it be the same for them?
That was certainly my experience when going to university. They were phasing in digital classes of sorts, so pressured lecturers to use PowerPoint or similar. I recalled almost nothing from those lectures, as it was impossible to take notes and listen at the same time. And without taking notes I'd forget.
The blackboard ones though, with carefully prepared notes by the lecturer... I'd write it all down, and would hardly ever had to look at them again as it stuck right away. However, I did have to write it down.
There is also scientific evidence that hand-writing down your goals on paper is a positive factor in achieving those goals (this was on a recent episode of huberman lab)
I like the decision, right move judging from what I read about cognitive development in childhood.
On a side note, as a highly gifted person, I found it somewhat amusing and tragic how people tend to cast blame on a school system in general and not on individual cognitive difference in their respective children.
Talking to parents, 90% believe their kids are above average in intelligence. Well, I have serious doubts. ;)
I can attribute a great deal of poor school results due to books and timed or take-home handwritten assignments.
I had a 40lb backpack for school filled with books and notebooks and implements required for class. Forgot a book? Lose a mark.
Random checks on note-taking during class. Forgot your notebook? Lose a mark. Protractor split due to the compression between two books? Lose a mark.
I walked to school on many days. My back hurt permanently.
I write with my left hand. Nobody knows how to teach this. Letters smear into the next. Ball point pens get jammed. Can’t read your handwriting? Lose a mark. Know exactly what you want to write but cant produce it in time? Lose a mark. Hand is cramped from P.E. from doing 30 pull-ups? Lose a mark. Its a pain to think faster than you can write as you watch the clock run out.
When it started being possible to turn in typed assignments or timed tests, life became easier.
The effects were measurable. For instance, paragraphs within essays were crossed out as illegible and removed from the final marks. So for instance if you had to write a 5 paragraph essay, and 1 paragraph was missing due to this, then maximum grade would be a C+ due to missing a conclusion section or introduction or other required section.
> Slides are entirely appropriate, especially if the teacher is teaching the same class multiple times per day.
I have had Maths professors who were teaching the same class for decades. They would pencil it all out on the blackboard. We copied it by hand. This slowed everything down and we got time to digest the content. First questions could be asked and answered.
And yes, we all had laptops, but we kept them in the backpack.
When I was in highschool my teachers started getting SmartBoards. Every class then spent some amount of time fiddling with the Smart Board, getting it to work, debugging it. For them to... just not write with a marker on the white board right next to it? It was a worse product for more money.
I actually had hand-writing in school, in Sweden in the late 90s. But since I didn't practice it outside of school, and was such a computer nerd, I can't write good at all now. Whenever I have to sign like 3 copies of a contract, I sign with 3 different signatures.
For a while I had a pen pal and that was very good practice, but it was slow, and painful to write a whole letter. I'd have to keep it up daily.
I don't think they'll be taught "skrivstil"/cursive, I think it's literally going from less iPads where you play Hangman or whatever to learn to read to more reading and writing. Cursive sucks ass, I hated doing that so much.
There is a lot of irony in the replies where most people here are in the business of shoving tech into every remaining open space in our lives whilst preaching it should actually not be part of a child's. I myself am a luddite quite honestly but I don't work in tech (directly) so it's odd for me seeing this sentiment so pervasive on a forum for tech workers.
Is it irony? I think the anti-tech sentiment is more pervasive amongst the people that enable it precisely because those people understand the sausage.
While my own experience and bias would say this is a good thing, because it says "Sweden" I take it (and now my bias) with a grain of salt.
Sweden perform quite significantly worse than the rest of the Nordic countries when it comes to school and things such as PISA scores. I do remember seeing in high school (2007 or so) on TV, how Sweden got a bad score and the education minister flat out denied the suggestions by pisa just to push through their political promises
(smaller classes, which I think was mostly a politically motivated, to get teachers support)
I think you should probably look to Finland, its much better neighbor, when it comes to school policies.
Edit: apparently according to this article[1] the negative trend of declining scores have been reversed since 2016 so who knows, maybe this is a good thing
Finland has been falling in PISA scores and the general consensus seems to be the over reliance on tech in education. The current government has also set less tech in schools as one of their goals. So sure, look st finland since they are going to do the same thing
> As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research
But I think the value is more in writing down your ideas, thought processes, diagrams etc. I don't have a source but I remember reading _something_ about it being a legitimate thing; that it's easier for us to remember and understand something if we've physically had to write it down.
Writing is not moving a pen across paper but learning to wield language. It's been decades since I wrote anything more than a few scribbles using a pen. It's slow. It's clumsy. My hands cramp up. It's literally painful. I don't miss it, at all. Useless skill as far as I'm concerned. I grew up in the seventies and eighties so that was just the way things were done. But that's nearly 40-50 years ago. Doing that right now is backwards.
Why teach people how to mess up their hands and wrists and then not teach then how to use a keyboard properly? Most writing that still matters gets done with those. It's faster, more efficient. A lot easier to produce lots of text. Which is actually a key thing when you are learning to write: you need to write a lot. Having tools tell you when you are getting your grammar and spelling wrong is super helpful. Having a teacher with a red pen is slow and inefficient. Fast feedback loops are great for learning. Getting corrected while you are writing is much better than days/weeks later when your poor overworked teacher gets around to dealing with your writing.
In the same way, I use a kindle. Actual paper books are a relic of the past. I read more than before I had ebook readers. It's so much better. Why limit yourself to books that fit in the tiny little backpack of a kid when you can the whole world of books and the internet at your finger tips? School books are dreadful. You get locked into whatever the school and published deems successful. Some schools get that right but a lot of them just fall for the mediocre drivel that the education publishers shovel out.
Modern schools should embrace technology, AI, and prepare kids for this century; not the last one.
Even though we have calculators, learning to multiply in your head is a valuable skill. Why because you can use it even when the power is down.
Handwriting similarly. You can write even when there is no computer around, or when power is down. I also believe the argument that it enhances motoric-skills.
And reading? Do we really need to learn reading when we can just ask Siri to read it out loud for us?
>Even though we have calculators, learning to multiply in your head is a valuable skill. Why because you can use it even when the power is down.
This argument feels weak, how often does your phone or watch actually reach the point of shutting down due to a drained battery? Pretty much never for me, so I basically have a calculator on my wrist and in my pocket 24/7. Having basic multiplication and specific results/approximations committed to memory is valuable because it can be faster than pulling up a calculator (eg certain powers of 2 as a programmer), but for anything where being precise matters, manual multiplication has been essentially obsolete for me since finishing undergrad (despite being in a very math heavy field now).
Outright being unable to write by hand is obviously a problem, as it's still possible to encounter a system that isn't digital a handful of times a year, but emphasizing quality as strongly as we used to should be mostly on the way out.
We can read much faster than we can speak and there is no reasonable way to have a voice assistant read all the text one encounters daily that isn't on their own device, so there I'd argue that the latter is objectively inferior in every way unlike with writing or mental math, where both sides of the debate have good points.
You're exactly right, but I'm sorry this is the forum for tech skeptics/haters now. That said, I think learning to scribble some notes is still a useful skill, but no need to write pages of essays by hand, it's pointless. And as for paper books, I've gone back and forth. For some reason I enjoy reading paper books more and I can easily share them with friends. I think you do get a better sense of the temporal/spatial structure of the book this way, so I prefer it for non-fiction. But it's still great to be able to download any book in existence as well, I still read mostly ebooks.
There seems to be a very different way of thinking when the human interface device is a computer vs a pen and paper or a book.
I can do some things behind a computer, but some kinds of thinking require me to be away from a computer. Oddly, the shower seems to be a place where I do some of my best thinking.
Don't bring back the old things; make new things that are more tactile. Advance them in new ways. For example, instead of using iPads - invest in advanced e-ink tech to bring better digital books to schools.
The piano example is an exception because, you can't really replace musical instruments.
But mechanical type-writers? Why not just invest in better mechanical keyboards, rather than the cheap membrane ones you see in schools so much?
Swedish parent here. I have not seen any effect from this yet. Hopefully there will be some improvements in time for my youngest kid. A new year in school began last month, and for my oldest kids what "acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy" means in practice (and if anything, so far it has been worse this last month than ever before): Each child gets a Chromebook. They get assignments through Google Classroom. Typically the assignments are things like "here are 20 questions; find answers!" and they are more or less on their own Googling and reading Wikipedia to figure things out. I noticed for a few assignments they get lists of recommended reading as well, and sometimes links to youtube videos that are relevant. And links to some awful, ad-riddled, quiz-site, for practice, that at least one of the teachers like to link to.
If I understand correctly some of the linked articles and videos are on some paywalled sites containing content specially made for school, so presumably there was some vetting there? When I had a brief look at some articles on subjects I happen to know a bit about I was not particularly impressed though. The printed books they used to have were WAY better.
Not that I am sure things are automatically better on paper. I read 99% ebooks and prefer that to books. But what they get now is not anything like the same books, but digitally, unfortunately. And linking to ad-supported sites, in addition to all the Google-dependencies, makes it worse.
On the positive side, my oldest son quickly figured out how to install Linux on his Chromebook to run games. I do not think they are allowed to do that, but I am not going to read the fine print to find out.
Good decision. Just like with Covid lockdowns. Somehow when you are away from a screen your mind expands, at least for me. Like the screen craves your attention and robs your thoughts. When I have some kind of problem with coding, I just move away from the computer, get a notebook, start scribbling and writing down things and the solution just comes.
Holy fascist washing batman! There's no centre party in the Tidö government, it just has conservatives puppeteer by a far right party founded by neo-Nazis...
Having worked in 1:1 schools and seen phone use / laptop has in the classroom this seems a step in the right direction. Tech is not the answer to everything in education it is just a useful tool that can and should be used from time to time like. Like a calculator but a more versatile.
What we have in many classrooms is a tech nightmare where tasks are digitized for just the sake of digitizing and attention span is lost, deep learning and concentration is lost and meaning relationships between student / student or student / instructor are diminished.
> What we have in many classrooms is a tech nightmare where tasks are digitized for just the sake of digitizing
I am glad that my child has been able to go to a school that only uses computers for tasks that can't practically be done otherwise (CAD for 3d printing, move editing, etc). Everyting else has been analog. Real books, real paper, writing by hand (cursive, even). Zero cell phones in elementary school by any kid. This is in silicon valley, so every kid has one or both parents in tech, so there is broad understanding of how problematic it is to let it dominate over the real world.
Recently I got in to mechanical typewriters for writing. I really like them! It's fascinating to have a machine which has no apps, no screen, no internal memory, and no distractions. You don't even have to "print" your page after writing it as the printing and the typing are the same operation.
The other day I was writing poetry at my computer and I had a Slack message pop up. I immediately clicked on it and responded, and then I went back to my poem and had totally lost my train of thought.
I am not suggesting schools use typewriters, but I wonder if there is value in considering limited functionality devices for specific classes in schools and similar situations.
I bought some cheap Chromebooks (100-150 euros, second hand), and removed nearly every app on them, apart for one for writing.
Having a separate device for separate tasks, can often be quite useful.
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I still remember learning to use typwriter in 1998/1999 (already knew some computer basics). Correcting typos wasn't particularly fun.
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During the process of replacing old processes with new ones, it’s hard to know what aspects of the traditional process (in this case, books and writing) are more valuable than understood. It seems like we are making a step in the right direction, but I wonder how we will prevent ourselves from making this and similar mistakes in the future.
> I wonder how we will prevent ourselves from making this and similar mistakes in the future
Just listen to the teachers, parents, and students. In high school I was among the last year groups to be pen and paper. All the younger students had laptops and iPads. I distinctly remember during the change that very few people thought it was a good idea, except for those students who got a free laptop or iPad out of it. I imagine the change was mostly brought about by administrators and politicians.
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It's not the tech itself that is the problem, and I think viewing it as the problem would lead one to miss a key trio of problems, that is equally applicable to books.
The problem has three interrelated parts: a) we do not value developing the capacity to think, b) the ability to think is not valued (by whom? I'm not quite sure), and c) we do not value doing things slowly.
a) Most have the mistaken notion that the capacity to think is fixed with respect to various biological factors. Putting aside whether the biology truly does fix this (I do not know enough here) the fact remains that this misses that there exist tools which can help us organize our thinking so that it appears to be "better". Examples of this are plenty in mathematics, where the symbolic "language" you use alone can make a massive difference to your "ability" to deal with a problem.
Some tools are more like internal narratives: if one develops a narrative that isn't constantly judging whether they are "thinking fast enough" or are "being productive enough" they ironically end up thinking more effectively.
(For examples of people interested in making such tools better known:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691156668/th...
https://barbaraoakley.com/books/)
And some tools are simply more biological: a person in good physical health can think more clearly than a person for whom this is not true, for the simple reason of nutrient supply to the brain being more efficient in the former than the latter.
Schools fail us on all these points. In particular, many current widely accepted textbooks are part of the problem here: https://bookstore.ams.org/view?ProductCode=SPEC/80
There's also what our culture tends to portray in entertainment. Contrary to what other think, I think entertainment is not harmless enjoyment due to the nature of our brain: as far as I know, there is no good way to consciously choose the weights you are applying to various inputs, while receiving that input (unless, ironically, you have training). Advertisers realize this, which is why "product placement", or "paid" narrative tweaking (presenting a story that is "cleaned up") work.
But more importantly, our entertainment industry does a terrible job of showing what is actually beautiful and exciting about problems in the real world. Instead, it defaults to shooting bullets, and adrenaline driven excitement. In a "biopic" about a scientist, it cares not about the immense beauty of their patient struggles, or what habits they purposefully cultivated in order to think more effectively, and instead prefers to view their achievements through a dramatic lens of romance and "lightning bolts of inspiration".
It is just as easy to put such entertain in the form of a book (e.g. Sherlock Holmes).
b) my contention that the ability to think is not valued, and perhaps actively devalued, is due to the fact that people are very willing to pollute information highways and entertainment feeds, in order to make profits. They are willing to distract people constantly from things they would prefer to be doing. They are willing to interrupt with needless reminders and notifications. They are willing to use Skinner Boxes to keep a person engaged regardless of what their conscious mind is interested in. Most importantly, they are willing to pay thoughtful people to figure out the best ways to do this: https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...
This is why technology is so disruptive. It is not usually designed to prioritize our ability to think, but is instead designed for other purposes. Which common place operating can you point to which has in-built tools to help a person manage over-use, or help a person track their time usage, or help someone stick to their goals around usage, or provides notifications in order to help a person get back on task? How many Skinner Boxes exist that around getting people to stick it out over the long term and engage with difficult material? (Most mathematics textbooks would be better as games.)
None. The issue could equally exist with, and without books. Dilution of quality of information, misinformation, de-focusing information: none of those ideas are tied to a particular medium.
c) To create something new that is truly valuable is time consuming. You cannot be overly prideful and expect to just "disrupt" things. You need to understand fairly well what the old process was, and work with people who use the old process. Perhaps even hire them as parts of the product-testing loop. You need to spend time thinking about the design, or employ people who are willing to do this. You need to spend time maintaining things, rather than just making the next new thing, yet you also need to be able to realize that "backwards compatibility" is not productive for humanity (who does backwards compatibility truly serve well? why are their wants prioritized).
None of these are ideas that are common in tech. So, the products the tech industry produces are for $$$ are overall, pretty likely to be garbage. But again, there is nothing unique about this to technology as it stands today: mass production, thoughtless production...these can be problems in any industry, and are problems in other industries too (e.g. the building industry).
I don't think the students will do better only because they are spending more time handwriting or reading books.
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As a Swede with toddlers (2 and 3 years old) in preschool I salute this. Preschools are required by law to use tablets in the "education" of toddlers, which is completely insane since more and more research are saying that using screens as a small child might disturb cognitive development. Call me old school but I think toddlers should play with sticks and balls.
Side note: the general view in Sweden is that the school is working terrible and many parents do all they can to teach their young childs to read, write and count because they don't trust the school system to do that for them. I think it's great to teach your kids as much as you can, but it's a bit sad that the reason is this one.
> the general view in Sweden is that the school is working terrible
It's quite universal to find that schools in your own country are terrible :)
Having lived (and raised children) in multiple countries, I can tell you I've never seen a country where people would say good things about their own education systems
Not sure why... probably simply because everybody has (good !) ideas on how it could be better, but they are not easy to implement ! :). Probably also because that's really something people care about
probably because they're run by the state
> Preschools are required by law to use tablets in the "education" of toddlers
What the actual fuck.
Yes, my childrens preschool was awesome but at the same time I did wonder why the need for tablets at such a young age. One reason stated was that it was a matter of equality, parents who could not afford tech means their children are at a disadvantage later on when they dont know how to use... touchscreens I guess? :)
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while i do agree mindless screen time on children is/may be damaging; i think there is a huge difference in using a tablet/laptop as a modern version of a notebook vs. using to watch Youtube Kids with Ads in between etc.
My guess is it's not technology per se that's the problem but that it gets used primarily to make the teacher's life easier and substitute for them giving lessons and feedback.
Also, ed-tech built by the lowest bidder is always going to be crap. Imagine "learning" as a kid in the same way that corporate training is done.
I think this is the right move, even if it's technically solvable to provide good tech-heavy education, I don't see it as practically possible.
Yes. From the article:
> “We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy,” said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research.
Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
> it's not technology per se that's the problem
That said, handwriting practice is correlated to developing fine motor skills, which are documented to be in decline in children in a number of countries. Excessive time with (touch)screens is terrible on that front.
My son could print perfectly legibly about age 7, then the schools tarted forcing letter shapes that were far harder to read with loops and smears etc.
His handwriting then devolved into a spidery mess which was impossible to read, which meant that marks started slipping.
Joined up handwriting is a disgusting unrequired curse on society. If you want to do "beautiful calligraphy" (unreadable scrawl) that's fine, have an optional class.
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Possibly because things such as:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
didn't get grandfathered in, but more likely because teachers just search for:
https://www.google.com/search?q=handwriting+worksheets
and grab the first free result.
That said, I would recommend:
https://www.handwritingrepair.info/
and
https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books
> Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
Eh, who knows what 'vetted for accuracy' means to this guy?
I mean, is Wikipedia allowed? What about Khan Academy, this Sal Khan guy doesn't hold even the lowest swedish teacher's qualification.
And that's without getting into the vetting of history textbooks.
I can well believe the rush to online learning during the pandemic lead to the use of material some people would consider unvetted.
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I think what they might be implying is that electronics make it very easy for teachers to rely on potentially inaccurate sources on the internet. Rather than that there aren't vetted sources that are acceptable to use (there probably are).
I somewhat tend to agree, assuming that the quality of teachers in Sweden is comparable to my own experience. In hindsight many teachers I had (especially for earlier grades) weren't likely to be better than the average rando taken off the street when it comes to vetting the material they use.
Only upon getting to university did it finally seem like the free/open source materials some professors liked to use were vetted.
> Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?
Maybe to train the kids in vetting materials themselves? Seems like an important skill. It's incredible that in school you're never confronted two contradictory sources of information and have to decide which is right.
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> "...knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy...”
Wikipedia?
All of school is structured around the fact that there is about one teacher per 30 students. Of course teachers will use tech as a way to reduce their own burnout. We know how to make a much better school: more competent teachers and more of them, ideally so that each student has a ton of one-on-one time with teachers daily. Whether books are paper or writing is by hand is really insignificant consideration compared to all the other shortcomings of school.
Thankfully every student will soon have a very knowledgeable, perfectly patient and available teacher: ChatGPT. At first I was skeptical schools will use them, since they don't tend to understand technology very well, but I think some schools will see the potential to relieve the pressure on their teachers and others will follow when they see the positive outcomes for students.
If allowed, ChatGPT will also allow teachers to spend less time on administrative tasks, which is one of the reasons why they're so burned out in the first place.
> My guess is it's not technology per se that's the problem but that it gets used primarily to make the teacher's life easier and substitute for them giving lessons and feedback
I think this is highly likely given what they are cutting back on is “independent online research.”
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For me, writing on paper provides insights that I just don’t get from a computer.
Writing outside the lines, doodles and swirls on the edges as I ruminate. Adding geometric borders around certain areas, arrows pointing at important things. Leaning in to add a tiny side-note…
I still always program at work with paper and pen on one side of my keyboard. It’s a bit like a mental clipboard for me. It also gives me another reason to get my eyes off the screen for a bit.
Interestingly I’ve never found writing helpful. I do better typing out my thoughts and writing samples etc. I’ve really tried because people who find writing useful have such great experiences. I even took copious notes in school because everyone said how useful it was. I never referred to them and eventually stopped and just paid close attention. I don’t whiteboard, I don’t jot down ideas, I am just able to keep things in cache and render them in documents, code, and diagrams. I think different minds work differently.
My challenge with standardized learning models is they work for those they work for, and cut down and ground down those it doesn’t. Then the beneficiaries write the rules for the next generation oblivious to the possibility that their experience isn’t the only one. I really struggled in American public school which is rife with learning style assumptions. I really hope a time comes when neurodiversity is accepted in public education, but until then I’ll keep sending my daughter to a private school that adopts a differentiated teaching style.
That's such a cool thing the way you describe it. I honestly wish I was that way. But for me, my most direct connection to expressing thought is a keyboard connected to a capable text editor. I remember trying to take notes by hand in college, and finding that it was easier for me to type in org-mode (mainly so I could write equations in latex, but not deal with latex outside of that).
I've never been a person who doodles. I may underline or highlight, but that's about it. I keep trying hand journaling and handwritten note taking. I'm not particularly slow or sloppy, but it just doesn't click the same way as the keyboard.
I guess the grass is always greener, isn't it?
It's been a few years since I had to deal with a coworker who likes to draw random stuff on a board or a piece of paper, insisting that it is essential for everyone to watch. I never do, as I have learned that guys like this consistently provide the worst explanations because they tend to focus on their drawings, which they like.
I realise this isn't what you said, of course. Maybe you don't do this.
I wonder what actually moving your hand to draw the characters does for the brain and associating the characters meaning. I definitely feel writing by hand is more intimate and it’s easier to think, but I’m a lot slower to write and my hand cramps often.
This is the niche that the ReMarkable tablett is trying to fill - all* of the interface benefits of paper, and all* of the syncing/etc benefits of digitization.
I don't personally own one, but one thing that the ReMarkable tablet fails to do is replicate the speed of flipping through paper. It's still somewhat slow.
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As long as schools allow to store books in their buildings...
I keep seeing (in Europe) kids with school bags full of notebooks and books that easily weight 4-5 KG. That's not healthy. The problem I see is that kids have homework that require the books at home, but then teachers use the books at classroom... so, they need to carry them here and there.
That’s not unhealthy, that’s good! Carry a moderately heavy bag to and from school is hardly difficult, or shouldn’t be, and that sort of weight will be from larger books meaning older children anyway. We have an obesity crisis in most countries - now is not the time to worry about older children/teenagers carrying a couple kilos for a short period each day.
I cannot remember a single person complaining about a heavy rucksack when I was in school a decade ago - by 13 we had CCF so had to go hiking with much heavier bags on the weekends. At 15.5 you can join the military schools and you’ll be carrying 25kg. This shouldn’t be a worry unless you’re physically disabled or something. Duke of Edinburgh involves hiking 13k a day with all your camping equipment and food at 12 years old over a weekend. Etc…
You'll not solve obesity by forcing them to carry books. On the other hand you can create some deformations on their spinal cord, esp if weight is not distributed correctly.
If you want to solve obesity, invest in education about healthy food and how to cook it, since usually bad food is the reason or extra calories
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For the first several years (here in Silicon Valley, CA) my kids had little to no content in their school bags (grades K-4). Then they had some stuff and we thought it'd be best if they got roller bags. Now they're in middle school and the roller bags are full and weigh 10kg+ it seems. Insane. I want them to ride their bikes to school but with this weight it would only happen with rear-racks and panniers. Sigh.
Do they actually need everything? Some kids tend to hoard all their school papers when it could be cleaned out and put in an archive binder/folder at home.
Does the curriculum require they carry textbooks in daily?
Why is carrying 5kg of books unhealthy for children?
“Many authors have concluded that the weight of a school backpack should not exceed 10% of the child's body weight”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4564613/#:~:tex....
The average 6 year old weighs 20 kg. The average 10 year old weighs 30kg.
https://www.disabled-world.com/calculators-charts/height-wei...
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If we take a young child weighting 20-30 kg, 5 kg would be 1/4th to 1/6th of body mass... 15-20 kg or 10-15kg carried daily by adult is not a light load. And children have less developed bodies.
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It’s unhealthy to carry them in modern backpacks id say. Poor design in a lot of them helps contribute to back problems
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How will you study books or notes for homework, if they are at school? I admit that we had a lot of school books to carry when I was young and I occasionally got a sore neck from lugging them around, but I wouldn't call it especially unhealthy. You anyway don't have that many school books until ages 13 and up here (Finland), and by that time you are perfectly capable of carrying things.
Usually this could be solved with a "home copy" for each kid, then "classroom copies" for kids to use in class. Kids still carry their notes, but those weigh a small fraction of what hardback textbooks do.
We didn't have a lot of homework. Only needed to take home a notebook and sometimes a book
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I worked in ed-tech for a couple of years.
Handwriting is about developing fine motor control which plenty of research have shown is fundamental for developing cognitive skills.
There are exceptions but generally technology rarely helps to learn better compared to pen and paper with a good teacher.
Personally I found soldering taught me fine motor control. But my family has genetically bad hand writing being a bunch of surgeons - who can’t write worth a damn but have super human fine motor control.
I would note of the things you listed: pen, paper, good teacher, almost all the alpha is associated with the teacher. And while the pen and the paper can be bought, a good teacher is only born.
I have excellent fine motor control in both hands. I can use knives, a mouse, scissors or solder with either hand, yet I have struggled- suffered!- with handwriting since forever.
Handwriting is one of those things I seem to have an argument with my son (he’s 10). And it isn’t about him having that specific skill. But it’s about having a sense of pride in your work and not half-assing things.
But my wife and I struggle to get anyone to agree with us. The teachers don’t seem to care (which my son is happy to relay to me).
Other parents say why bother, it’s an outdated skill (I actually disagree, even though my handwriting is often bad from lack of practice, when I do fill up forms by hand, I understand the importance of legibility).
But again, to me it is symptomatic of a larger issue where I feel that more and more, kids are not taught to have a sense or standard in the quality of their work and improve upon it, regardless of the particular skill.
I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.
Am I alone in this? Looking for a good counterpoint.
You one-sidedly pick a skill for someone else, that they don't enjoy and don't find useful and that you can't reasonably justify as being useful.
Then you insist that they do it well.
But that's not enough - you also insist that they have to want to do it well.
Which you also can't justify, other than very abstractly, by insisting that everything they do - including things they didn't choose themselves, don't care about, don't find useful and won't actually find useful - they should want to do well.
I'd be more worried for someone who didn't find that preposterous.
Being able to hold a pen in your hand and write a note that looks legible is a fundamental skill. One should be able to write a message on a card that does not make the recipient want to puke or at least wonder if whether the author survived what looks like an obvious stroke. It’s a matter of self respect.
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>I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.
You aren't alone, but I think this is terrible advice. You should figure out what you want to do and find the best way to do it. The best way will probably involve half-assing a lot of stuff, since you only have a finite amount of time/energy.
I had a teacher at school who used to say "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing properly", but he mainly said it about things that weren't worth doing.
Relating to this, a big realization for me was in highschool when I was given the advice by an elder sibling that I didn't need to try to do everything perfectly if I had other important things to do. Eg. it's okay to take a small hit on one class's grade by skipping a weekly homework assignment if it means being able to focus on the term end project from another class.
In hindsight it seems kind of obvious, but I was so used to the parental pressure to just do everything perfectly from my earlier years that it had never occurred to me to prioritize. Although I suppose it does still require you to have a mature sense of priorities, since skipping all assignments to party every day is obviously not healthy.
I take pride in all of my work, but at this point, as a PhD student, if I put my 100% into everything, I'd have to forgo even sleep. I have to figure out which tasks are more important and which I can hand off to others or simply ignore because my supervisor probably won't even remember asking me to do them in a week.
> "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing properly"
Big life lesson for me was "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing poorly" Even if it's more worthwhile doing it a little better (and once done poorly you can work toward that if it makes sense).
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Is it terrible advice? Those are quite strong words. I don't think it is terrible. It may not be for everyone but I can surely see that such a philosophy and approach to life can be fulfilling. I think it can make you focus, do less but do it better. Quality over quantity, kind of.
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In my opinion handwriting is as useless a skill as is possible. I never use my handwriting - ever. I likewise don’t churn butter, do arithmetic beyond what I can do in my head, or card yarn for my clothes.
There is nothing redeeming about artisanal hand scripting other than writing annotations on objects to label them, and even then a label maker does a better job in every dimension. Typing is a fundamental skill in the modern world, and type written text is not just considerably more legible, it’s also indexable for search etc.
Having a sense of pride is often coupled with a sense of utility and purpose. Few people feel pride in useless exercises done for rote purposes and celebration of the way it was done in the past. Some certainly do, and god bless them. But I feel more pride in my code than artisanal scribbles, in my handiwork, in my learning, etc. Kids are no different. Maybe they feel pride in their Minecraft creations. Is a complex red stone build with intricate visual designs and creative use in game not more compelling and interesting than manipulating a wood stick to make glyphs? A lot of people think the things a kid takes pride in aren’t worth taking pride in, and instead try to make them take pride in something from their own childhood.
They are misidentifying a lack of interest in your interests with a lack of pride in their work.
I grew up entirely pre-smartphone, so my education was mostly handwriting except a couple typed papers a year (and then even more handwriting in college—oh, the hand cramps on tests).
A couple months ago I had to write about five sentences by hand, and it dawned on me that that single act was probably twice as much handwriting as I’d done the entire prior two years, not counting signatures and such.
It was a really weird thing to realize.
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I don’t think you’re alone. And I appreciate your arguments. They’re valid, even if I disagree.
My perspective is that there is an ever growing wealth of knowledge and skills and only so much time in the day. We see this conflict in some hardcore parents who sign their kids up for an entire childhood of studies.
I think it’s deeply important to have pride in your work and to do it carefully, patiently, methodically. I’m not sure this must be practiced with any specific skill.
I think doctors are an example of how this can be at odds with reality. Do they not take pride in their work, or do they have just so much to study that they cannot afford the expense?
I think it’s also important to identify that this discussion often conflates two things: cursive handwriting and legible printing. I believe schools still endeavour to teach kids to print legibly.
Good point that there has to be some kind of decision about each skill. I should clarify I am not asking for us to be great at every single thing.
But at least have that debate in your head. Is this a skill I want to put time into improving?
And “nobody else cares” shouldn’t be a _major_ part of that argument.
Our school doesn’t teach them to print legibly. That’s my point. I’ve seen his homework and sometimes it borders on illegible.
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It is a well-established fact that the mechanical act of handwriting notes is good for memorization. Perhaps it is meditative, perhaps we're just physical beings -- whatever it is, typewriting on a computer is not as good.
A famous man whose name I forget once said "Plans are useless, planning is indispensable," and I would like to paraphrase it as "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."
> "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."
This is very, very true for me. I read, optimistically, 5% of my notes.
As a corollary, I’m unable to take notes if the notepad is too fancy. I get analysis paralysis from something like a moleskine, like something this nice deserves nicely formatted notes. Only cheapo gas station notpads work for me.
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This is not at all a well-established fact. There's one questionable study on this topic that used to go viral occassionally, and that's it.
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This is entirely false for me.
Writing takes up all of my concentration, and I literally do not hear what the person is saying next while I'm writing down what they just said.
No, that seems to be the prevailing viewpoint, which I find sad.
Powerful argument for Sloyd Woodworking instruction coming back to schools:
https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others
See my other post in this discussion for a link to Kate Gladstone's site and as well as SE Briem's list of calligraphy texts.
A touchstone for me on this is John Quincy Adams' translation of Wieland's Oberon:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/458794
which it is well worth finding a facsimile copy of.
Or see:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/21860485@N06/albums/7215764113...
One thing to try, would be to have the child write thank you notes.
My third-grader here in digital Sweden started "Sloyd" woodworking class this month. Thanks for sharing these links.
The kids all have their own iPads in the classroom but they seem to be used very sparingly, mostly for extra drills occupying kids who finish their handwriting-heavy schoolwork early.
> And it isn’t about him having that specific skill. But it’s about having a sense of pride in your work and not half-assing things.
Maybe you'd have more luck teaching him the latter if you focused on skills/work that are clearly useful. Or useful to him atleast even if you disagree that handwriting is outdated.
Take pride in your work and doing it well is a useful lesson (and unfortunately not something I'm great at personally) but if he doesn't see any value in that specific work he'll never even comprehend the difference between work done well and work half-assed, never mind strive for it. All he see's is you asking him to put more effort into a pointless activity.
I reckon this is one of the reasons that sports and arts are relatively successful at teaching kids life skills like discipline. It's easier for kids to see the immediate value of being good at those than other skills, so their more motivated and lessons stick.
Good points. I am getting a solid smacking and lectures from HackerNews (the kind I often dole out) but appreciate the input from all of you.
I know my son especially will. Well, he IS obsessed with Soccer.
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My son was in a school that taught English via immersion (they hired English teachers who couldn't even speak any German).
Starting with grade 1 the kids wrote exclusively with fountain pens, and were marked early on on penmanship. Except in English, where they were allowed to write with pencils or biros so of course they did because it was a change, and the teachers didn't seem to care about penmanship at all.
Two decades later his writing with a fountain pen in any language is as clear as a bell, while anything else results in a scrawl. I don't believe it's because the tool is superior in some way, I think it's simply the attention to detail got wired in.
==
An amusing nerd side point: In grade 1 they learnt a letter a week, and from that were reading by xmas. To avoid confusing the kids, English was supposed to use "German letterforms" but really they are pretty much the same! Anyway the funny thing is that in English they start the first week with "A" (Apple, Ant), then "B" (Banana, Buffalo) and so on. German was taught in the alphabetic frequency order: "E" (Elefant), then "N" (Nase), "I" (Igel) and so on. Disappointingly, Christmas came before they got to ß as I was curious what they would do (no word starts with it).
I think there is something very different about handwriting than typing. Like, listen to a lecture and write notes on a pad, and then go to the lecture the next day and type them on a computer.
Then, wait a week, and take a test without reviewing anything.
My money, based on my experience, is on you better remembering the handwritten notes. I think this is because you cannot write as fast as you type, so you have to hear, think about what is important, and summarize when handwriting. When typing, you can get almost all the words someone says typed out. So you switch to "hear-to-type" mode without thinking.
So, I think it is important for learning to have that skill. I think it is better in the real world too, for some use cases. If I am in a meeting with a counterparty, I take hand written notes. I rarely look at the notes after. Why? I remember what we talked about.
I used to bring a computer and type out notes - and I still do if I need perfect information to reference later - but when I do that, my notes take the place of my memory.
It seems more efficient to handwrite my notes and have my memory be my memory instead.
Or, better yet, why not actually prepare for the test, by doing the reading, and the homework?
Notes are an incredibly poor substitute for putting in the actual work of learning.
Research has shown that writing notes by hand leads to better retention than typing even if the notes are never read in the future. However, given that writing is just 7000 years old, I'm not sure how long will it take before typing to become the more natural skill (if typing does last for 7000 years that is)
> I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well.
I’d like to counter with “perfect is the enemy of good”. Knowing when to half-ass something can be a skill in of itself.
I don't read this as a counter as the skill you mention is in full alignment with the grandfathers advice.
I think your second sentence needed a verb. This would be a case where half-assing it did not.
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I think your focus on kaligraphy is damaging to the lesson. You should pick something your son values, and teach him to drive it to perfection. Then watch him getting annoyed when you half-ass it in front of him.
All education is a crude attempt at telepathy and while repeated confrontation can transport the value you place upon a thing, it does not make it intrinsic. Also skills are filtered for right to exist every generation. Skills become value less is a normal and even healthy thing.
it's a child. By definition it doesn't know what it values. This has seemingly been forgotten but parents have a mentorship and guiding role. Their job is to cultivate in their children interest in activities in the first place. When I was young I hated that my parents made me learn an instrument, because I wanted to play video games and eat ice cream all day. As an adult (who became a part time musician) I understand the value of it.
"do what your son wants' gets you children raised on an ipad with no education in the arts.
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Handwriting is like drawing or music. Do you absolutely need it? No. But it is another mode of operation, that develops brain. Arguably, reading and writing/typing may become obsolete with next decade or two, thanks to voice interface enhanced by NN models.
I doubt that reading/writing/typing will be replaced by speech. You simply can't speak or listen anywhere near as fast as you can do any of those things.
There are other features about a piece of homework than how the handwriting appears. Is the content high quality? Did he learn? Did he do it efficiently? Did he enjoy doing it? Is it well-designed or beautiful in other ways? Etc. Your kid can feel pride about these other features of his work, some of which may be mutually exclusive with high quality handwriting! Selecting the handwriting as high priority is somewhat arbitrary on your part. I'd be concerned that you're overlooking other arguably more important signals of pride and joy in your kid's work by focusing on this one.
If you want your kid to practice high quality craftsmanship, to feel pride in a job well-done, let him choose another craft where the quality is inherently relevant, like woodworking or sewing (or calligraphy)!
.
A second angle. Imagine you are trying to learn to write code and someone insisted you use a difficult keyboard: each key is a different size, they're spaced out across the desk facing different directions. (Or, say, insisted you use punch cards). You'll surely have a harder time learning to code!
> Looking for a good counterpoint.
You only have a limited number of hours in life to devote to acquiring mastery, and there's a nearly unlimited number of subjects that are worth mastering.
Instead of trying to be good at everything you're doing, decide what you're going to be good at, what you're going to outsource and half-ass, and work towards being good at the former, while getting by/paying other people to do with the latter.
You need to take pride in something, but you're fooling yourself if you think you can do everything well - or that its a good investment of your time.
Maybe instead of forcing him to become an expert at a skill with incredibly poor return on investment, you should drive him towards becoming an expert at... Writing.
>kids are not taught to have a sense or standard in the quality of their work and improve upon it, regardless of the particular skill.
I'm over 40 and I was never taught that- not at school and certainly not at home.
Maybe I’m mostly remembering my grandpa haha.
We were penalized for untidy work in school though. That was my early years in India.
>But again, to me it is symptomatic of a larger issue where I feel that more and more, kids are not taught to have a sense or standard in the quality of their work and improve upon it, regardless of the particular skill.
You mean so they can work 60 hours for a mediocre salary with little upwards mobility that won't even let them buy a house anymore while sinking in student debt?
Knowing when work for the sake of work is a waste of your life is a very important skill now that you can't walk into a random company Monday morning and come out with a job
I haven't seen the phrase 'critical thinking' in a long time. The concept of a standard has dropped, though kids are exposed to much more generalized criticism online than we were in school.
You can post anything online and get global feedback (at least in theory, people are silo-ing more everyday). You can see others get harsh feedback. There's youtube channels dedicated to tearing apart X Y and Z products for their flaws.
Unfortunately the internet returns most people to the mean or average, within a bell curve. There's some incredible knowledge online, but it's not enough to replace a critical university teacher leaning over your shoulder, or working under a master craftsman and enduring his continual destruction of your failed attempts. Standards are hard won.
Holding an internal standard and conscience has been subverted upvotes/downvotes and by the internet in general, in my view.
Hypotheticaly subtract internet points and approval seeking from the online world, and you'll see the idea of a individual standard re-emerge, I bet.
Edit: Handwriting is super important. Typing on keyboards has an arbitrary mapping between action and outcome. Handwriting directly connects your muscles and mind together and gives permenancy to your handiwork that forces consideration. I keep a diary, by hand. I cross out mistakes and initial them. Best habit in my life, would not trade it for the world. Any serious thoughts I need to 'get out' or improve, go there.
I hated writing as a kid. I think part of the problem was that my thoughts were much faster than my pen, so I by default wrote as fast as I could. If I tried to write more legibly, my writing would still look poor compared to many others, and I'd have to slow to a fraction of the speed, so why bother? For instance, whenever I have to write my email address on a form (you know, it has to be perfectly legible or you won't receive your email), and half the letters still look like trash.
Counterpoint: Pareto principle. For 20% of effort you get 80% of results, so you are better of 1/5ing-assing 2 things for a total of less than half the effort and more than 50% more gains.
Your grandfathers advice might have been sane back in the day when you could only do one or two things and so quickly hit diminishing returns, but today it does not matter greatly.
More emotional argument. What do you call the person who does more than they get rewarded for (over a long time?): a sucker. And who wants to be a sucker?
I once saw a documentary about Nelson Mandela. When he read a newspaper he was very careful to line up the pages and to crease the paper so it was straight and had even corners between the different pages. He did not half-ass the act of turning pages in a newspaper. It seemed like such a waste of time. How much less must he have had time to read, wasting time to turn pages like that?
On the other hand he had an incredible reputation and was admired as a leader across the world. Perhaps his attention to detail mattered even when it seemed like a waste.
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Handwriting is one of the easiest methods by which you can practice fine motor skills and manual dexterity.
Also, I really enjoy watching a thought literally flow out of my body onto a page. There is something very disconnected about pressing keys on a keyboard to see the words appear on a screen -- sometimes I find myself in a state of flow on a computer where it all seems to 'click', but contrast that with handwriting and I can get right into flow the instant graphite or ink meets paper.
I totally agree that children should be encouraged to write legibly, which means banning cursive.
I have recently seen some children work out things (mechanics, strategies, communication) to perfection in video games. They are incredibly perceptive critics of their own and other's performance.
They are probably much better than your grandfather at both game and meta-game, because they are standing on the shoulders of slightly larger people. They are familiar with the conventions and input methods and community and thus have a base understanding that few older people do.
Funny I used to use this argument when people used to complain to me about video games. They can be incredibly complex and utilize your brain in amazing ways.
And I actually have zero issues with him playing video games. The sports ones involve building your team, trading players, etc. That's all pretty complex stuff.
This is my own personal bias talking here but I think handwriting might be a poor subject to teach the wider lesson of taking pride in your work. My hand writing has always been terrible. It was a big deal 30 years ago (when I was at school) - it's not really been an issue since. But it's not whether it's outdated or not, it's just not something which easily improves with practice (at least, in my experience). Even when I spent a lot of time and energy trying to slowly draw individual letters the end result was still messy.
My problem was exacerbated because I sat next to a kid who was a great artist. He used to draw comic strips (at age 9-10) and the lettering looked professional (at least to my eyes). Yes if I had spent an enormous amount of time and effort I could have improved my handwriting but I don't think I'd ever be able to produce 1/5th the quality of what he did. My hand just wasn't (and isn't) that steady.
With other subjects you can spend a lot less time and improve quality a lot easier and faster. With something like code layout it's much easier to brute force tidiness in a way that just isn't possible with handwriting (or drawing).
Your son could have dysgraphia. My son (14, homeschooled) struggles with writing, and it was hard to not think of his poor writing as a result of him being lazy or not caring.
We purchased some material from Dianne Craft to help with his dysgraphia: https://diannecraft.org/dysgraphia-what-is-dysgraphia/
The exercises definitely helped.
My kids have gone to a Montessori school since pre-K and those schools teach handwriting. It's not done because of how much or little the student will use that handwriting later in life but more because, early on, it helps develop fine motor skills.
Now that they're in high school, my daughter has excellent penmanship. My son... not so much. :) But! He can do it.
An alternative hypothesis is that it's done because it has always been done, and the fine motor skills thing is merely an attempt to rationalize this practice.
Depends what profession you end up pursuing. If your son pursues computer science then likely never need to use handwriting ever again. As a 10+ year software engineer I've never needed to handwrite anything professionally, not once. Personally, still like to do the occasional handwritten card or letter for friends and family.
> not once
not even on a white board?
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Calligraphy is an art form. The good thing about art is that you can't argue with it. Practice for the beauty!
Rather than argue about this, perhaps it may be better to see if you can get your son to be interested in practicing calligraphy, where the whole point of the exercise is to write in beautiful way. Otherwise, you're trying to win an argument about something that is often tangential to another goal.
You and I both have terrible handwriting. In my life, it hasn't been a hindrance to my work as a software engineer so maybe your son has a point. However, I do agree that doing things well has merit but maybe reframing it will get you farther along this goal. And lastly, maybe you can achieve the same goal through other means? Perhaps in playing an instrument or practicing some other skill. I think the value you want to teach your son is practicing something and doing it well. It doesn't need to be handwriting.
>I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.
This seems fairly contradictory to me. He's not choosing to do it, he's forced to learn some outdated skill. Let him excel in some useful skill, like mathematics.
45 here. I certainly didn't and don't appreciate the fact that I spent hours on Saturdays improving my cursive during early education because my writing was horrible unless I took too long to do it. I envy the younger generations.
I don't think it's a generational thing. I think it varies by family. Neither my parents nor grandparents really pushed that kind of message even though they were very focused on education. My family is Jewish-American and still have strong cultural memory of being deliberately excluded from opportunities despite effort. I absorbed it as a dual mandate to learn as much as possible and to play whatever game the schools needed you to play to get recognition.
I also had terrible handwriting despite tons of experience. Meanwhile I knew kids who wrote like typewriters from the 4th grade just due to natural talent.
Pick something more impactful. It's hard to have a sense of pride for something that will be read once and promptly shredded. Maybe share examples of how having good penmanship has helped you?
I have a good hand and enjoy writing with the gel 0.5. Cursive was drilled into me as a child.
I will still take notes and write my thoughts out on paper. It somehow manages to provide me focus and shut out distractions. It’s also a space I can do a lot of free form thinking and tie things together.
Assists shouldn’t be given at an early age. I believe they are counter productive.
Another example. We never used calculators till 11th grade. All calculations had to be done by hand. I can still quickly approximate to know if numbers are in the ballpark.
By this logic, should not schools teach calligraphy?
Sure, why not?
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Everything I do in my work (Software Engineering) is about just getting it done/ getting v1.0 over the line. Not my choice, but leadership don't seem to care about things being done well so long as they're done.
There’s plenty of scientific evidence that handwriting is good for you
https://redbooth.com/blog/handwriting-and-memory
Can you provide him with an example, such as a work notebook with notes taken during a meeting, or while thinking through a problem? Or a handwritten letter/card received from a close friend/partner.
By handwriting, do you mean cursive? Or just writing words on paper by hand?
Cursive truly is an outdated skill. When the forms really matter, they say please print -- and they do that for legibility.
Teachers don't care about handwriting anymore because handwriting is not part of standardized testing, and that is how schools and teachers are evaluated now.
learn him to draw? equal in some ways of creating w pen/paper. draw letters/fonts etc. lmk if u need help.
I went to the top private school in my country
Cursive handwriting was not optional, same for spelling. Teachers would flunk people and no, there are no repeats at that school. From 200 in kinder, only 70 finished HS
You are on the right side, find people who give a damn about education.
One advantage of giving kids laptops for schoolwork is that we won't be training a generation that can't touch-type
I am a bit serious here though, gone are the days where you were expected to learn computer skills at home. Most people don't use laptops all that much in the same manner millennials used to use desktops. So we are growing in a generation where people prefer to use touchpads instead of mouses and can't touch-type, hampering the productivity of these people unless they train themselves out of it. They have little reason to do so because it is not a 100% difference, more like a 5-30% difference depending on task
Funnily enough there is an argument to be made that a lot of millennials and older can't swipe-type in touch devices which is also valid!
I'm usually looking at people when they type on keyboards. When I was young (1985) most people that had to type, knew how to touch type. Then came a phase where it was hunt and peck when the computers showed up and everyone had to use them for work. Later you were expected to at least know the finger position even though you look at the keyboard while typing.
But I haven't had opportunity to see much people typing for a while until last year. Just last week I saw two people working at a bank not able to type numbers on the numpad without looking and using one finger. Both of them around 25. The optician could not touch type, was using a fast version of hunt and peck with three fingers total. Also around 25. But the dentists and doctors could touch-type pretty fast. All of them 40 - 60. (I started working as a personal assistant part time so see a lot of medical people, Sweden)
I am starting to see programmers intern/entry-level who can't touch type, less common for people with college degrees in IT though. Also in Sweden.
I don't wish they'd bring back cursive; I wish they would teach shorthand. If I would have learned shorthand in the 2nd grade, it would have made every single class I took after that better, because I could have taken much better notes.
Do you know it now?
I know Teeline shorthand, which is easier to learn than Gregg shorthand. It is fine for taking note from books or articles, but not quite fast enough to take notes from spoken language.
Interesting. My parents did all my handwriting practice when I was a child so that I could go out and play. Our school graded on exams and labs alone which I aced. My handwriting remained rubbish as I aced my undergraduate program, remained rubbish as I started work in software, and has remained rubbish as I've climbed from success to success.
Contra-other-posts, I don't think I would have learned anything of value from handwriting. Perhaps my exam scores would have been higher as some things weren't misunderstood.
I also relied on zero notes during lectures, instead finding that close attention lead to near complete recall in class, but I suffered when I tried taking notes as an experiment. My Algebraic Geometry class was a complete disaster.
Ideally, if I had to make tradeoffs, my children would be like me: with good alphanumeric and concept recall from memory. I think it is superior to note-taking.
I want my daughter (aged four) to enjoy writing by hand. It's part creative, part practical, but I also think that humans have a connection to the physical act of making things, or marks, that will take a (very) long time to go away, and that we will yearn for if we stop.
That said, I love making things, drawing, painting etc, but have terrible handwriting, and mostly hate doing it! My teachers never let me get my "pen licence", so to this day I much prefer a mechanical pencil.
Hasn't it been proved as well that writing things out by hand is the most effective way to memorize things? Wouldn't all schools want to teach this valuable tool to students?
I am a scientist and over the last years I stopped using notebooks for notes... I lost something, you connect deeper with your thoughts by writing with hand. Now I occasionally use A3 papers when I see need, but still. I will take a notebook tomorrow!
I haven't looked into this, just responding intuitively, but aren't we trained to learn better by writing by hand because of our upbringing. If the next generation stops hand writing and starts typing from early childhood education, wouldn't it be the same for them?
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That was certainly my experience when going to university. They were phasing in digital classes of sorts, so pressured lecturers to use PowerPoint or similar. I recalled almost nothing from those lectures, as it was impossible to take notes and listen at the same time. And without taking notes I'd forget.
The blackboard ones though, with carefully prepared notes by the lecturer... I'd write it all down, and would hardly ever had to look at them again as it stuck right away. However, I did have to write it down.
There is also scientific evidence that hand-writing down your goals on paper is a positive factor in achieving those goals (this was on a recent episode of huberman lab)
I like the decision, right move judging from what I read about cognitive development in childhood.
On a side note, as a highly gifted person, I found it somewhat amusing and tragic how people tend to cast blame on a school system in general and not on individual cognitive difference in their respective children.
Talking to parents, 90% believe their kids are above average in intelligence. Well, I have serious doubts. ;)
I can attribute a great deal of poor school results due to books and timed or take-home handwritten assignments.
I had a 40lb backpack for school filled with books and notebooks and implements required for class. Forgot a book? Lose a mark. Random checks on note-taking during class. Forgot your notebook? Lose a mark. Protractor split due to the compression between two books? Lose a mark.
I walked to school on many days. My back hurt permanently.
I write with my left hand. Nobody knows how to teach this. Letters smear into the next. Ball point pens get jammed. Can’t read your handwriting? Lose a mark. Know exactly what you want to write but cant produce it in time? Lose a mark. Hand is cramped from P.E. from doing 30 pull-ups? Lose a mark. Its a pain to think faster than you can write as you watch the clock run out.
When it started being possible to turn in typed assignments or timed tests, life became easier.
Don’t do this to kids.
Sounds a bit dramatic, don’t ya think?
The effects were measurable. For instance, paragraphs within essays were crossed out as illegible and removed from the final marks. So for instance if you had to write a 5 paragraph essay, and 1 paragraph was missing due to this, then maximum grade would be a C+ due to missing a conclusion section or introduction or other required section.
Wow, I haven't thought about the joy of carrying textbooks in ages. Those were the days.
Sounds like a teacher problem more than a book/handwriting problem to me.
Also, you walked to school -many- days? Good to be you, as I walked to school every day throughout all my life, including to University.
Those digital blackboards are pretty bad.
They are laggy and have lower resolution than a chalk board or a whiteboard.
And what for? What can they do that a whiteboard cannot?
(teachers should write on a board and not use slides, because slides cause teachers to go too fast and to jump over important details.
Easy to erase. Easy to show slides, videos, or animations. Easy to annotate said media with the digital market.
Slides are entirely appropriate, especially if the teacher is teaching the same class multiple times per day.
> Slides are entirely appropriate, especially if the teacher is teaching the same class multiple times per day.
I have had Maths professors who were teaching the same class for decades. They would pencil it all out on the blackboard. We copied it by hand. This slowed everything down and we got time to digest the content. First questions could be asked and answered.
And yes, we all had laptops, but we kept them in the backpack.
It was awesome.
(German university ~10 years ago)
Just wheel in the frickin' TV on a cart! Is that so hard?
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When I was in highschool my teachers started getting SmartBoards. Every class then spent some amount of time fiddling with the Smart Board, getting it to work, debugging it. For them to... just not write with a marker on the white board right next to it? It was a worse product for more money.
I actually had hand-writing in school, in Sweden in the late 90s. But since I didn't practice it outside of school, and was such a computer nerd, I can't write good at all now. Whenever I have to sign like 3 copies of a contract, I sign with 3 different signatures.
For a while I had a pen pal and that was very good practice, but it was slow, and painful to write a whole letter. I'd have to keep it up daily.
I don't think they'll be taught "skrivstil"/cursive, I think it's literally going from less iPads where you play Hangman or whatever to learn to read to more reading and writing. Cursive sucks ass, I hated doing that so much.
There is a lot of irony in the replies where most people here are in the business of shoving tech into every remaining open space in our lives whilst preaching it should actually not be part of a child's. I myself am a luddite quite honestly but I don't work in tech (directly) so it's odd for me seeing this sentiment so pervasive on a forum for tech workers.
Is it irony? I think the anti-tech sentiment is more pervasive amongst the people that enable it precisely because those people understand the sausage.
While my own experience and bias would say this is a good thing, because it says "Sweden" I take it (and now my bias) with a grain of salt.
Sweden perform quite significantly worse than the rest of the Nordic countries when it comes to school and things such as PISA scores. I do remember seeing in high school (2007 or so) on TV, how Sweden got a bad score and the education minister flat out denied the suggestions by pisa just to push through their political promises (smaller classes, which I think was mostly a politically motivated, to get teachers support)
I think you should probably look to Finland, its much better neighbor, when it comes to school policies.
Edit: apparently according to this article[1] the negative trend of declining scores have been reversed since 2016 so who knows, maybe this is a good thing
[1] https://www.thelocal.se/20161206/what-swedens-improving-scho...
Finland has been falling in PISA scores and the general consensus seems to be the over reliance on tech in education. The current government has also set less tech in schools as one of their goals. So sure, look st finland since they are going to do the same thing
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> As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research
Children. Independent online “research.” Right.
Handwriting is a good skill I suppose.
But I think the value is more in writing down your ideas, thought processes, diagrams etc. I don't have a source but I remember reading _something_ about it being a legitimate thing; that it's easier for us to remember and understand something if we've physically had to write it down.
Writing is not moving a pen across paper but learning to wield language. It's been decades since I wrote anything more than a few scribbles using a pen. It's slow. It's clumsy. My hands cramp up. It's literally painful. I don't miss it, at all. Useless skill as far as I'm concerned. I grew up in the seventies and eighties so that was just the way things were done. But that's nearly 40-50 years ago. Doing that right now is backwards.
Why teach people how to mess up their hands and wrists and then not teach then how to use a keyboard properly? Most writing that still matters gets done with those. It's faster, more efficient. A lot easier to produce lots of text. Which is actually a key thing when you are learning to write: you need to write a lot. Having tools tell you when you are getting your grammar and spelling wrong is super helpful. Having a teacher with a red pen is slow and inefficient. Fast feedback loops are great for learning. Getting corrected while you are writing is much better than days/weeks later when your poor overworked teacher gets around to dealing with your writing.
In the same way, I use a kindle. Actual paper books are a relic of the past. I read more than before I had ebook readers. It's so much better. Why limit yourself to books that fit in the tiny little backpack of a kid when you can the whole world of books and the internet at your finger tips? School books are dreadful. You get locked into whatever the school and published deems successful. Some schools get that right but a lot of them just fall for the mediocre drivel that the education publishers shovel out.
Modern schools should embrace technology, AI, and prepare kids for this century; not the last one.
Even though we have calculators, learning to multiply in your head is a valuable skill. Why because you can use it even when the power is down.
Handwriting similarly. You can write even when there is no computer around, or when power is down. I also believe the argument that it enhances motoric-skills.
And reading? Do we really need to learn reading when we can just ask Siri to read it out loud for us?
Computer-skills of course are valuable too.
>Even though we have calculators, learning to multiply in your head is a valuable skill. Why because you can use it even when the power is down.
This argument feels weak, how often does your phone or watch actually reach the point of shutting down due to a drained battery? Pretty much never for me, so I basically have a calculator on my wrist and in my pocket 24/7. Having basic multiplication and specific results/approximations committed to memory is valuable because it can be faster than pulling up a calculator (eg certain powers of 2 as a programmer), but for anything where being precise matters, manual multiplication has been essentially obsolete for me since finishing undergrad (despite being in a very math heavy field now).
Outright being unable to write by hand is obviously a problem, as it's still possible to encounter a system that isn't digital a handful of times a year, but emphasizing quality as strongly as we used to should be mostly on the way out.
We can read much faster than we can speak and there is no reasonable way to have a voice assistant read all the text one encounters daily that isn't on their own device, so there I'd argue that the latter is objectively inferior in every way unlike with writing or mental math, where both sides of the debate have good points.
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You're exactly right, but I'm sorry this is the forum for tech skeptics/haters now. That said, I think learning to scribble some notes is still a useful skill, but no need to write pages of essays by hand, it's pointless. And as for paper books, I've gone back and forth. For some reason I enjoy reading paper books more and I can easily share them with friends. I think you do get a better sense of the temporal/spatial structure of the book this way, so I prefer it for non-fiction. But it's still great to be able to download any book in existence as well, I still read mostly ebooks.
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There seems to be a very different way of thinking when the human interface device is a computer vs a pen and paper or a book.
I can do some things behind a computer, but some kinds of thinking require me to be away from a computer. Oddly, the shower seems to be a place where I do some of my best thinking.
I think one approach is to complement tech with its analog/mechanical equivalent.
Have people play on a real piano but also complement with garage band. Use mechanical type writers alongside Microsoft word.
Get kids to understand the origins of many of our digital tools.
There's no point. Kids don't want to.
If you want to get kids on board:
Don't bring back the old things; make new things that are more tactile. Advance them in new ways. For example, instead of using iPads - invest in advanced e-ink tech to bring better digital books to schools.
The piano example is an exception because, you can't really replace musical instruments.
But mechanical type-writers? Why not just invest in better mechanical keyboards, rather than the cheap membrane ones you see in schools so much?
We should stop indoctrinating school children into proprietary software.
I remember a time when "grasping" something was a literal thing. Strangely enough, however, I only became aware of this when I studied Hegel.
Handwriting? Really? Must be nice to have so much classroom time available that they can afford to waste it teaching what amounts to a hobby.
Swedish parent here. I have not seen any effect from this yet. Hopefully there will be some improvements in time for my youngest kid. A new year in school began last month, and for my oldest kids what "acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy" means in practice (and if anything, so far it has been worse this last month than ever before): Each child gets a Chromebook. They get assignments through Google Classroom. Typically the assignments are things like "here are 20 questions; find answers!" and they are more or less on their own Googling and reading Wikipedia to figure things out. I noticed for a few assignments they get lists of recommended reading as well, and sometimes links to youtube videos that are relevant. And links to some awful, ad-riddled, quiz-site, for practice, that at least one of the teachers like to link to.
If I understand correctly some of the linked articles and videos are on some paywalled sites containing content specially made for school, so presumably there was some vetting there? When I had a brief look at some articles on subjects I happen to know a bit about I was not particularly impressed though. The printed books they used to have were WAY better.
Not that I am sure things are automatically better on paper. I read 99% ebooks and prefer that to books. But what they get now is not anything like the same books, but digitally, unfortunately. And linking to ad-supported sites, in addition to all the Google-dependencies, makes it worse.
On the positive side, my oldest son quickly figured out how to install Linux on his Chromebook to run games. I do not think they are allowed to do that, but I am not going to read the fine print to find out.
It's about clay tablets.
They should come to Southern Europe, that is how most schools keep being, there is hardly any budget to have a couple of computers per school.
Good decision. Just like with Covid lockdowns. Somehow when you are away from a screen your mind expands, at least for me. Like the screen craves your attention and robs your thoughts. When I have some kind of problem with coding, I just move away from the computer, get a notebook, start scribbling and writing down things and the solution just comes.
There are numerous studies regarding the brain and dexterity development but they got co-opted by the video game and quick fix industry.
If you want to learn how to write with an active mind, you can’t have assists. Pencil is okay with erasing, pen is permanent.
Oh well.
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The onslaught of greedy Google and Microsoft execs on our education system will not allow this to happen.
> new center-right coalition
Holy fascist washing batman! There's no centre party in the Tidö government, it just has conservatives puppeteer by a far right party founded by neo-Nazis...