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It's not about handwriting per se but about using fine motor skills. For a healthy development of the brain, young kids need to develop motor skills which neurologically will allow cognitive skills to develop properly later on.

Sorry I don't have any link to back this claim but I worked for a couple of years in EdTech with pedagogy experts.

Fine motor skills can be developed in many ways, including many ways that use more modern technology than a pen. If it is the motor skills that are important, then they should focus on those and not one particular means of practicing them.

Yes for example let kids use a real mouse, and then they can practice hitting the "x" on all the ads that pop up. /s

Does typing Not require fine motor skills?

Or using mouse!

Motor skills, certainly. But not fine motor skills, obviously. There's a pretty big difference between getting within a cm of accuracy needed to press a key and drawing submillimeter-accurate curves. An aspiring artist or surgeon certainly needs that level of skill. But do fine motor skills impart other cognitive benefits?

> we should be teaching the skills that people need in today's world, and that overwhelmingly means typing.

You don't need a ton of practice to get good at typing. Anyone can reach 80 WPM within a year. That's more than enough. Handwriting is much more difficult and needs more practice.

Even software engineers who type all the time need to write on whiteboards to get jobs. /s

> Handwriting is much more difficult and needs more practice.

Okay, I'll buy that. So, why are we teaching it? For whiteboard interviews?

I realize it will take some restructuring of society before handwriting is an obsolete skill, but gradually de-emphasizing it in school isn't a bad way to get there, over the course of a few generations. The time schools save can be used on any number of other skills.

> So, why are we teaching it?

Here's a list of random, unresearched reasons:

1. It teaches fine motor skills

2. Some people learn reading and writing better when writing by hand. Some people learn better in lectures when taking notes by hand.

3. Tech isn't always available. Sometimes pen/pencil and paper are all you have when you really need to write something.

4. Drawing, painting and other art require learning how to hold and use pencils, brushes, pens, and other tools in a fine, controlled manner. If people are going to learn to make art with manual instruments, they may as well learn to write at the same time.

5. Text input is genuinely more awkward on keyboards for many non-Latin languages, and is less emphasized in development of software products. That relegates those language learners to second-class status as they grapple with tools built for the Latin/Cyrillic world.

6. There's a ton of cultural significance to writing by hand: calligraphy, religious or legal rites.

I can probably come up with a dozen more but to get to your next point.

> And the time schools save can be used for any number of other things.

If you want to talk about outdated holdovers in children's education, summer vacation is the biggest one, dating from when kids were needed on farms to help bring in the harvest. Schools could simply eliminate summer vacations if they really wanted more time to educate. No more complaints about teachers only working 9 months/year, no more summer learning slump (or whatever it's called), no more paying for daycare or summer camp 3 months/year. A lack of time is not a real problem.

Most everyone is bad at writing on chalkboard or whiteboards unless they practice it as a separate skill. Teachers sometimes get training.

> we do in fact have worse memories than scholars during the Middle Ages.

I wouldn't be so sure. People can regurgitate from memory dialogs for entire movie series, TV shows, and countless songs. We also remember deeply nested folder structure on numerous computer systems, variety of software interfaces (e.g. click Menu > Tools > Options...), and innumerable memes/facts/lists. Sure we forget a ton (is it needle/haystack or haystack/needle?) but we know and remember a lot more than medieval epic poems.

Navigating the modern world requires an insane amount of memorization but since we no longer need to remember road signs or phone numbers, we feel we remember less today than decades or centuries ago.

That sounds right. Anecdotally, some things I have memorised:

- Several phone numbers

- My National Insurance number (UK version of Social Security)

- 16 digit card number for 2 cards, as well as all the other numbers on the cards.

- 10 or so passwords (less important ones are randomly generated and handled by password managers.

So as you say, we may not be able to recite a 50-page poem, but one could argue that it's a lot easier to live in the modern world with many abstract strings memorised, in addition to all the knowledge that's considered crystallised intelligence.

You need to write to do math, which is a major focus of K-12 education.

This is true.

I don't think schools should completely drop handwriting, at least not within my lifetime. It's necessary for filling out forms at the doctor's office, and signing contracts.

But a little basic ability is all you need—you don't need to write neatly or quickly. So if schools want to focus on it less, that makes sense to me.

Nobody should have to write whole passages by hand.

I fundamentally disagree. There's conclusive evidence that writing notes in lectures by hand leads to better recall.

And kids should not be dependent on these disgusting privacy-invading ad platforms we call computers to write things down.