Comment by jillesvangurp
1 year ago
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.
In some sense machines are taking over reading as well at least partially, and therefore it is imperative that we learn to read, not just let machines read for us.
An example would be reading a post on Facebook which was originally written in a foreign language which we don't understand. Therefore the machine must read it first, and then translate it to us so we don't have to read the original, which we couldn't do anyway.
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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