Comment by dotnet00

>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.