Comment by Barrin92
3 days ago
Apart from learning I'd also like to see more research into the effect switching to digital devices had on tactile skills. I used to mentor at a makerspace a few years ago and at least anecdotally, younger people seemed to have what we in Germany call "two left hands" (don't know if that's an English idiom too).
At least to me it seemed like there's a real loss of fine motor skills. Digital devices are pretty impoverished interfaces. Even if I compare my own handwriting to my parents, who learned cursive more seriously and wrote more by hand I feel like my penmanship is just worse.
> I feel like my penmanship is just worse.
You cannot learn everything. Is good penmanship worth spending time on? What are the other options. What if I gave you (8 year old you, your parents when you were 8, and you today - I want all 3 answers) a choice: you can learn cursive, piano, or go out to the playground. What is the best use of your time? My parents would have selected cursive, but on hindsight I can say it was a waste of my time. I always wished I could play piano (this is why I put piano in the list - there are millions of other options you can teach a 8 year old that we do not), but playground time is also valuable and would have appealed to me as a kid.
Sure fair enough, I wasn't trying to narrowly hone in on writing, if you want to make the case for more instrumental education I'm on board with that too. And someone recently actually asked me "where have all the high school bands gone?". It seems like (passive) digital entertainment is eating into all of these activities.
I'm just broadly in favor of incorporating physical development, because who knows what it does to your brain if all you do is push buttons on a screen, as I said anecdotally I don't think anything good. The easy thing to writing about me is that you can basically incorporate it for free. People learning Kanji or math on paper, for one is likely better for retention but also even cheaper practically. As far as I can tell buying students tablets just cost a bunch of money.
> You cannot learn everything. Is good penmanship worth spending time on?
There are some really good arguments that penmanship (actually, any fine motor skill) ultimately improves intellectual capacity.
Maybe, though when I read those critically I suspect that it is more just time spent on something. Hunting rabbits with a sling requires fine motor skills as well, is that good enough (This is the most primitive, 'uneducated' task I can think of at the moment - there are plenty of others). How does learning violin compare? There are plenty of other possibilities that those arguments don't adequately address.
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