Stop Teaching Handwriting | Hacker News Reader

Stop Teaching Handwriting

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28 pointsrobg83 comments

I'm 18 years old, and I live and die on my computer day in and day out. And yet, for all of my college classes I take notes with pen and paper. It's insane to think that a child would be able to get by in school without decent handwriting skills. Maybe in 20 years, but certainly not yet. That said, the asinine emphasis on 'cursive' handwriting I got for two years makes me cringe every time I think about it. That time could have been much better spent on things that I might actually use in real life.

Define: "decent handwriting skills". For instance, if I never learned how to write a G "correctly", I could still take notes and do just fine in the rest of my life. Teaching that "skill" is a waste of time. Handwriting learned on your own would be good enough for your purposes. Communcations with other people today requires a separate set of skills - typing, writing, speaking, even debating - that aren't taught enough. Instruction in handwriting is a waste of precious time - developmentally and socially - when there are better alternatives.

This is stupid. There is a correct way to write a G. That's how the alphabet looks. Yes you can stylize it but it has to generally fit the mold of the G. If you were using a different alphabet, you would have to learn how to write the letters/symbols of it.

You are arguing against teaching people the alphabet basically.

No, I'm against wasting public resources on marginalized skills while teaching kids that learning is about boring you to death. How many of us have sloppy handwriting and after how many hours of us being "taught"? Handwriting today is much more often for personal use. My handwriting is good enough if I can read it.

Teach typing instead. The child will learn a much more useful skill and with many more applications. They'll pick up handwriting as necessary (just as they do typing now). Invert the priorities.

There is as much reason to teach typing as there is a reason to teach a class in how to use the XBox controller. Nobody under the age of 25 has any trouble learning how to type.

I don't know if handwriting is or isn't a big deal. I don't remember having to do it after kindergarten. 3rd grade seems a bit too old, perhaps the author is really just embarrassed her kid is still failing the slow kid's class?

It would be interesting to see what would happen to society if handwriting class was abolished. Home Economics and running at recess were tossed out and now everyone is obese and in debt.

Nobody under the age of 25 has any trouble learning how to type.

Hmm, I don't know about you, but about 4-5 years ago when I learned to type it was pretty difficult. It took me a year school classes to get up to 40 wpm.

And recently I started re-learning how to type - using Colemak. But it's significantly easier, since I already have the finger dexterity. Either way, I think that your exaggeration is slightly too much. For younger kids, learning to type isn't as easy as you seem to think it is. (And most of the people I know now only type at 50, maybe 60 wpm - had they been taught earlier and with more emphasis, they might be typing at 100 or 120.)

No causation - compare situation in other countries.

Aren't you blowing this out of proportions? As far as I remember, handwriting was a part of the first year of elementary school, along with learning to read. It's not like pupils have to spend endless hours on it, year after year.

Where I went to school (Germany), there was a mark for "good handwriting" throughout grammar school, but it did not have any significance (no bearing on you being eligible to go to a higher school). It was meant to encourage you to be tidy. I always had the worst possible mark in that "subject" - whatever. I also don't think there were any further courses on handwriting. It is useful, though, if teachers try to teach you some good habits for keeping notes (like the girls all using a ruler to underline stuff...).

In the U.S., when I went to elementary school in the early 80's, there were multiple years devoted to handwriting - first print then cursive. But even one year is too many, especially because that is endless hours. It sounds like things haven't changed.

But how would you give lessons at school without pupils being able to write?

Typing. Start with big keys that make phonetic sounds. Shoot, Fisher Price has this:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5716931

at Wal-Mart for two year olds! And it's twenty bucks.

Then by second grade teach touch typing. It's such a fundamental skill, there's no good reason not to start when kids start formal school, if not before. I've done one study with kids as young as four and most clearly knew how to use a mouse and keyboard.

I don't think typing would be as efficient, to be honest. What if there are diagrams that need comments? In general, what if some graphical structure to the text is needed (like bubbles around words pointing to other bubbles, and so on). Getting a text to look right can get complicated fast on a computer. Maybe with pure words per minute, you can do better with a typewriter than with writing, but I remain doubtful concerning typical lecture notes.

Not that I wouldn't have liked to learn typing at school.

Edit: my question was not "what would you teach instead of handwriting", the question was how to teach the other stuff without handwriting, that is, how are pupils supposed to take note. Surely you are not suggesting they take notes with the fisher price toy?

Seriously, you're suggesting that kids need to be formally taught how to draw? You don't think they can copy something that's printed on the chalkboard? And you don't think kids would learn to write on their own? Didn't we learn to type that way?

All I'm talking about is inverting the priorities, especially for young kids. Four and five year olds aren't expected to take notes. The stuff you're worrying about mostly comes later. And then, just like now with typing, they will know what they need to even without formal education shoving it down their throats. When did you learn to take notes? I don't think it was expected of me until 6th or 7th grade, if then.

I don't recall spending so much time on learning how to write. I remember we had a book with the cursive letters in big that we were supposed to follow with out pencils a couple of times. One of the first homework assignments I really hated, consequently, my handwriting was always ugly.

But yes, I think kids need to be taught how to write, they don't just learn it by copying from the board. Or maybe they would eventually, but it would take longer. With your argument, why have school at all, why not let kids learn everything by themselves.

Also, I wish there was more emphasis in school on learning how to structure thoughts (on paper or elsewhere). The few bits on handwriting, underlining headlines and so on are among the few lessons where this aspects play a role - most other stuff really is just copying stuff from the board and learning it by heart.

five year olds also need to take notes, for example write down tomorrows homework assignment. Of course you could put the assignments on a web site so that kids could look them up online instead - but I think that would produce a much higher workload for teachers.

"With your argument, why have school at all, why not let kids learn everything by themselves."

That's not my argument. I want schools to focus on critical skills, especially during early childhood. Handwriting, today, isn't one of them. Teach kids to type. Penmanship can come later, like typing today. Invert the priorites to match real world demands. Kids are already typing and using computers any ways.

I don't ever remember taking notes in elementary school. Assignments were handed out and completed. They could just as easily be emailed out and typed in. Problem is, the kids are probably more computer literate than most teachers.

I completely do not agree. I use a keyboard since 10, and I write faster than most people, yet I have a fountain pen and maintain all my personal notes in a Moleskine.

It is hard to me to rationalize it but handwriting enables me to focus entirely on my thoughts, without any distractions, wherver I am. I stumbled upon my best ideas while handwriting.

Personally I even believe that people should be taught calligraphy. It does not make any direct sense but in our attention economy, with constant distractions, it is good to be disconnected for a while.

I also think some calligraphy work in school would be a great idea; not so much because it improves your handwriting, but rather because it teaches you to concentrate on what you're doing at the moment.

This is a great point and, to be honest, the real reason why it makes sense to learn handwriting, reading paper books or mathematics. Focus is one of our most important assets and without ability to focus it is hard to accomplish anything.

So, you need to be able to write with a pen so that you can read it.

I can read my handwriting just fine. And, my chickenscratch is easier to write at a higher speed, so my ideas are less choked.

It makes sense to teach the arts. But requiring traditional penmanship as a measure of writing ability is absurd.

This was, without a doubt, one of the dumbest articles I've read on HN in a long time.

I wish I had better handwriting, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who wish they wrote less clearly.

A lot of the commenters here have brought up that you need handwriting in order to take notes, and that putting pen to paper has some meditative qualities that help flesh out ideas. I agree with both points, but neither one is a rational justification for requiring penmanship of students.

I still take notes with pen and paper quite regularly. I can read my own chickenscratch just fine, even if no one else can. Who cares? In fact, while in college, I developed a sort of hyper-condensed personal shorthand, to the point that my notes are basically a code that only I'm fluent in. That was key, because it let me spend more time listening to the lecture and less time drawing fonts. To paraphrase pg, "terseness is what written language is FOR" ;)

If anyone else has to read it, then you type it. Most of my teachers in high school and college required papers to be typed anyhow, and this is becoming much more common. It's only in elementary schools that we subject children to emotional abuse for their lack of calligraphy skills.

As for the meditative qualities of putting pen to paper, that's still not an argument for requiring penmanship. Most of my "fleshing out ideas" writing looks more like a flowchart anyhow, usually with plenty of the aforementioned chickenscratch shorthand all over it.

I don't wish I wrote less clearly. And I can write just fine if I do it slowly. It's just that my penmanship is almost entirely a purely personal activity, so as long as I can read it, there's no problem. We should teach kids to type fluently, think clearly, and draw script that they can read.

In high school and college you are required to take quizzes and tests. You are not allowed to use a computer, and therefore must handwrite them. Legibly.

you need handwriting in order to take notes

Nope.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295110

I was convinced to design a system so that I could actually pay attention in class and take good notes, as well as take notes during these important face-to-face conversations. So whenever somebody says something interesting, I can get it down unobtrusively, quickly, and actually then reuse those notes later on in further conversations.

That's why I made a wearable computer. ...

I went to a heads-up display. I could put the focus on the whiteboard, and suddenly I could keep up. And I found not only could I keep up and take good notes, especially with this one-handed Twiddler keyboard I have, but it actually focused my mental attention, so that during a lecture I got a whole lot more out of it than ever before. And that's why if you've ever seen me in a meeting or a lecture, you'll see me taking notes furiously on my wearable computer not just so I get it, but also because it keeps my attention focused. I can put in new ideas and new offshoots and things I want to ask later into the stream of data that I'm capturing. ...

I also have a one-handed keyboard called a Twiddler. It has 12 keys on the front and six keys on the top. One of those keys is actually a joystick. It allows me to type up to 130 words per minute, though I maintain about 70 when I'm writing papers, that sort of thing. ...

And this is the system I wear basically every day. Right now, if you looked at my screen, you would see that I have all the previous conversations I had with David here – one on 25 January 2006, one on 25 January 2007, and one 29 January 2008, today. So every time I've met with Gartner, I've kept notes on the conversation.

This is the Twiddler:

http://www.handykey.com

And yet, this is an "intelligent" reply?

If handwriting is still being taught in schools, it's being extremely overvalued. When's the last time a kindergartner, or any elementary student for that matter, was required to take a typing class? And yet, those students learn to type at a passable level.

Teach touch typing instead. The children will learn the same fine motor skills but with something that will be much more important throughout the rest of their lives. They'll pick up handwriting as necessary, but public education shouldn't hand out grades and devote significant resources to its teaching.

I hope that the next time your doctor writes a prescription for you, he doesn't think that good handwriting is extremely overvalued.

Hmmm, except my doctors - in their 30's and 40's and 50's - must have received plenty of good ole fashioned instruction in handwriting. What went wrong!?

Instead, I'd prefer a web app that allows my doctor's office to connect directly to the pharmacy. Heck, a good one wouldn't require any text even - point and click on the medication.

As an interesting sidenote-- Kaiser Permanente implemented this point-and-click pharmacy ordering a while ago, and supposedly cut their prescription mistakes by 95% and saved almost forty lives lives last year.

I went to a public school in NY. We had a weekly touch typing class in 5th grade (during the mid nineties). It wasn't rigorous enough to make great typists out of us, but it provided a decent foundation for keyboarding electives in middle school and high school.

This is exacly my point. A 5th grade typing class that meets weekly and electives down the line? But daily handwriting classes in kindergarten and 1st grade and often probably later? That seems very backward to me.

To counter with my own anecdote, I went to school in NY and had a required typing class in 7th grade. Then more electives if I wanted to take them in HS.

We had writing in Kindergarden/1st/2nd grade. Which doubled as English lessons (expanding vocabulary, etc). And learning how to read as well. Maybe I was just lucky enough to have good teachers, but I assume that it was done intentionally. Never writing "cat" over and over until the "c" was perfect, but finding different words that have a "c" and writing those instead.

Again, I see exactly zero harm but plenty of benefits by swapping that ordering of typing and handwriting - typing in kindergarten and 1st grade and handwriting in 7th grade. And that wouldn't change the reading or English lessons. Indeed, it would enrich them. (Think of typing 's' and hearing the sound it makes. Then 'sh'. Then 'shi'. etc.)

To counter your point - was talking with a Prep (ie - Grade 0) teacher last night.. She's doing MS Office classes with her Preps. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer. (And this is a public school in a lower-middle class area - admittedly in Australia).

I'm sure there's probably more handwriting classes - but it's slowly changing..

Question - Which Do you think would be better to learn the structure of letters from? Learning to type first, or learning to draw out the letters?

There's a reason I loved Australia when I visited - progressives!

Quite honestly, if you paired typing with auditory feedback for what letters sound like ('s' from 'c' from 'z' from 'sh' and 'sp'), you'd not only help the kids to learn the letters but also how to read. Handwriting doesn't offer that dual modality approach. Further you could pair typed words with the objects to which they refer (think animals), the sounds they make, and other facts about them. I'm actually shocked there aren't teaching programs like this. There must be that I'm not aware of.

my name is carolyn

Agreed! A third grade kid who confuses the direction of the hook of a 'G' when writing it himself does not indicate that writing is obsolete. It indicates a failure of parenting.

Now I wonder if this sort of article should be tolerated simply because it generates discussion...

He might be dyslexic or something. She's got a point.

I did consider the case of being dyslexic, in which case he wouldn't just have a problem with handwriting, but also with reading and writing in general, regardless of medium. At the age of 8 or 9, you'd expect the kid to already have it diagnosed and actions taken.

But you made me re-read the article (actually the middle three paragraphs, which I skipped because the intro and final paragraphs weren't interesting). Fair enough -- she has a point. It could be about cursive, stupid teachers, bad curricula, schooling, or just handwriting in general. Not sure which, and that the title is incendiary and that she stated her profession in the intro just doesn't do it for me. I admit my comment was untamed though.

The arguing from authority really bugged me too, and as such I also skipped the same stuff...

He's dyslexic, therefore schools shouldn't teach handwriting?

Care to fill out the missing steps in the syllogism, to make the "point" you think she's got?

I write something maybe once a year. Maybe once a week I have to sign something. Sure it's a useful thing to be able to do, like speaking a foreign language, but it's no longer a necessity in many working lives.

Teaching typing to kids would be far more useful once they can write well enough to get by. Spending ages on getting lovely neat joined up writing seems a bit of a waste these days.

This is masterful! A recommendation for the education of kids in general based on your personal experience. I'm hereafter speechless and agree with others that the submission did not deserve exposure on HN.

Please list a few professions which still require a high level of penmanship/calligraphy.

Most professions have long since moved from filling out paperwork, to typing. It would make sense to reflect that when we educate our children.

I have a few kids of my own, so this isn't just me imposing my own personal preference, this is me wanting the best for my own children. Having the best chance of getting a good job etc, and learning skills that will be the most use.

Can you imagine the embarrassment of not being able to write a sentence on a piece of paper? The issue is not that everyone needs to have great penmanship, the issue is a basic fundamental skill that we all take for granted precisely because it was taught to us in school.

I wish I had better handwriting, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who wish they wrote less clearly.

That is not a good enough reason. I don't know anyone who wishes they were was worse at the high jump. That's not a reason to devote more school resources to it.

This is a question of priorities. There is not doubt that handwriting is now less important then it was 15 years ago. That should be reflected in the school curriculum. There's room for debate on the issue of how much.

I do wish my school had spent less time teaching me a skill I will never use.

At my school I don't think there was even an option to learn to type. That seems a pretty large oversight given how often the average person in the workforce needs to type something out.

I completely agree, I might be able to read a series of notes, but just because I'm no Yehudi Menuhin doesn't mean that we should stop appreciating music should we?

It's a ludicrous argument, but given her next post it seems that this is her modus operandi.

It's almost impossible to take notes in math with a computer too.

I tried writing all my notes in LaTeX for a semester, but I'd waste so much time/energy worrying about typesetting that I didn't pay enough attention in class.

That being said, I'd recommend everyone should try to take notes in LaTeX for a month or two. If nothing else, it makes you fluent very quickly (a skill any computer scientist/mathematician worth their salt will need eventually anyways).

Also, a student writing his G's backwards isn't a fine motor problem - it seems more like a memory/symbol disassociation thing (much more serious). Writing sloppily or in large print is a fine motor problem. Writing backwards isn't.

My handwriting is awful, but the moment I switch to writing math, it becomes clear.

I think the reason is that my handwriting is bad not because I'm incapable of writing clearly, but that I'm incapable of writing clearly at the speed I want. I can write clearly if I slow down. When I write out math, each symbol means more. I don't have to write as fast, and getting the exact symbol correctly means more, so it's slow and clear.

I had a classmate who could with no problem TeX notes in Harvard’s Math 55 (a course with notes which went up on a chalkboard so fast I could barely keep up writing them by hand), including drawing commutative diagrams, etc.

It’s just a matter of experience and a bevy of personally defined macros for common bits. “Almost impossible” is a great overstatement.

Notes in math class? Pay attention to the lecture, and understand it. Taking notes is worse than useless - it gets in the way of your understanding.

Hmm... I take all my notes in LaTeX as well. For me, I found that it was more a matter of having the correct macros than any inherent slowness in the LaTeX type setting system. My preamble grew to about 130 lines before I was really able to type effectively in class. However, the benefits of this approach are undeniable. It halped me become good at LaTeX but more than that it made my notes easy to archive, retrieve, share, and use in general. Referring back to old theorems is a lot faster when you have Ctrl-F at your disposal.

The key is that if you write a similar thing more that ~3 times, make an emacs abbrev for it or a latex macro for it.

This is ridiculous. TFA claims that we shouldn't teach handwriting because her son struggles and makes claims that an author used a typewriter in the 1880s because they probably shared the same problem with nothing to back it up.

Sure, nobody 'needs' handwriting when they're in front of a computer keyboard but its a lot easier when you're outdoors and need to write a quick note down (and no, T9 is not the answer), especially given that paper doesn't disappear when it loses charge.

Why assume that handwriting wouldn't be learned if it's not taught? How many of us took typing classes?

Because there are relatively poor alternatives to it. Think of it this way -- if people were used to T9 interfaces on phones, and you had a T9 pad for a computer, then most programmers would be entering their code using T9 because it's harder to learn to type properly.

As someone who has tutored a number of dyslexic young people, I have seen this pattern repeat itself over and over. The teachers at most schools just don't get it. They seem to think that trying to manipulate children emotionally with "interventions" and the like will magically fix their awkward/sloppy/inverted handwriting (letter inversion, as others here may have mentioned, is a classic dyslexia symptom). It's cruel and unnecessary, and reflects a lack of competence.

Having said that, I mostly disagree with this writer, though I understand her reaction as a parent. In the course of my training, I was told that handwriting, and cursive handwriting in particular, are important to learn because when done correctly, they reinforce the brain's neural pathways associated with particular letters and sounds (1). For example, we had students stand at a whiteboard and write large cursive letters while reading/saying them at the same time (2). The acronym was V.A.K.: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic. The idea was to associate lots of information (from the eyes, ears and muscles) in the brain with the different letters and their sounds.

Of course, most schools don't do that, so the lesson of this article seems to be this: teaching handwriting to kids is bad for them if you're doing it wrong.

(1) I'm not a neurologist, so this might be the wrong way to describe it.

(2) The students worked one-on-one in private rooms with tutors that they trusted, NEVER in open classrooms. This is an important point.

(edited for formatting)

I appreciate your perspective. I am a neuroscientist, and this subject closely rubs up against my training. I see nothing in handwriting that typing doesn't also give the developing brain. If anything, typing, especially touch, seems to require more fine motor skills than handwriting. And with the possibility of computer games to help teach typing, and coincident with auditory (hear 's' versus 'sh' versus 'sp') feedback (which helps normal and atypical reading development), you could teach typing, reading, writing, and spelling in one well-designed program while providing different types of focused feedback. Handwriting not only has less real world utility, but it is also harder to learn while being a more solitary skill. The more I think about it the more I'm verging on outrage that so much emphasis is still given to handwriting over typing.

This woman seems to think that sacrificing the pen for the keyboard somehow makes us a more evolved or sophisticated brand of human.

But when I picture a room full of Americans than can't even scribble their own names on an application form, I get exactly the opposite impression.

If you learn how to read you'll know how to write good enough. All it takes is to replicate the shapes of the letters you read (and how I learned to write in print since we were only taught cursive).

That's a strange argument. Learning to do something is going from seeing it being done, to doing it. Seeing the raw material, seeing the end product (either in you mind or in the world) and being able to use the raw material in the right way to produce something useful. That is the hard bit - knowing how to control things to get the desired result.

All it takes to play the piano is to replicate the sounds of a tune you hear. All it takes to paint a good observational painting is to smoosh some colours on a paper to match what you see.

It just doesn't work that way.

It depends on how much time you're willing to invest in it.

I think a lot of posters are missing the fact that the author is complaining about cursive writing, not printing. Of course kids need to learn to print. But the result doesn't need to be beautiful, flowing, and elegant; it just needs to be legible. Let's spend our time making the letters that they write useful, not beautiful.

When I was in elementary school, I routinely lost points on assignments because I chose to print instead of writing in cursive. (I also lost points for using a pencil instead of pen. Apparently I should correct my errors by rewriting an entire essay, not by erasing. What the fuck!?)

Even at the age of 7, I considered this silly and realized that the public school system was a waste. I was right.

There is actually a movement among homeschoolers to avoid cursive until much later in the learning process. We'll probably such a routine with our kids (and we'll probably have them typing at an early age, too).

I had a very similar experience in school as well. Once I was through with cursive, I never wrote that way again (my signature is chicken scratch). I do, however, still pick up a pen and paper every day, if only to write in my journal.

Just because we have calculators doesn't mean we should stop teaching mental math. Same goes for keyboards/handwriting. On the other hand, "show your work" and cursive do seem archaic, and probably could be dumped.

Not teaching handwriting doesn't mean no handwriting. It would just decrease the emphasis. Besides, I'd rather see touch typing classes from a young age. Why not simply replace one with the the other? Just as typing is often learned with no formal education, so would handwriting be. Just invert the emphasis.

Even then, by the end of our lives if not sooner, speech recognition (and without overt vocalization) will probably make typing obsolete.

Sorry, but this is inane. Just because your son sucks at writing doesn't mean that the pen is obsolete.

Paper isn't going anywhere. It's still the simplest, cheapest, and most robust of recording information on the fly, and nothing on the horizon is going to change that; Legible writing will continue to be useful for the forseeable future, even if it isn't used for long manuscripts anymore.

I agree that the emphasis on pretty curisve forms isn't that important -- hell, I've almost forgotten how -- but legible writing is still very important.

Handwriting has been a tool of the educated for several millennia, I doubt it will so quickly fade into irrelevance. The author of this post has some relevant points, but extends too far.

Handwriting's role is changing, and will be less relevant over time, but there is and has since the beginning of literacy been a difference between reproducing texts and taking notes. The former is already irrelevant (and is the part of the author's point I agree with). The latter won't be for some time.

And what I consider just as critical, is the basic ability to sketch. On a blackboard. On a notepad. On a napkin. Sometimes I need to express ideas visually in a way that technology hasn't caught up with to allow me to do as versatilely as I can with good old writing utensils.

It still needs to be taught, but noone should ever be penalized at school for writing chicken scratch.

There is a difference between "handwriting" and "writing" and it is certainly true that there is an overemphasis on handwriting - to the severe detriment of writing skills.

Being able "to write" (as in, put thoughts and ideas together as words) is much more important than being able to write (as in handwriting), yet schools do tend to focus significantly on the latter.

It's important to know how to write by hand, but it should not be considered even vaguely superior to the art of communicating or "writing".

I think the perils in this come in teachers forcing every kid to write perfectly, regardless of any impairments they might have. I have dyslexic dysgraphia, which literally prevents me from writing neatly. It sounds like this guy's kid has something similar. Teachers who teach handwriting should be trained to diagnose something like this and help the kids along not by telling the kids that their penmanship is awful, but by teaching them new grips or ways to get around their lack of fine motor control.

How many people in this world can afford a computer to learn to type on? Along that vein, how many schools in the US can afford to equip each student with a full time computer (since they won't be able to write notes down)?

Get grounded in reality. Writing will be taught for a long time to come, and rightfully so.

Strong Disagree Making marks and symbols with our hands that other people can read is something uniquely human. Should we not speak because we can text as well?

To write, to read, and to speak are the foundations of human evolution. Technology augments these natural gifts, not replaces them.

While I don't quite disagree with this article, I think a lot of people have raised that handwriting is a useful skill in a lot of places that require a low-tech solution to communication.

While it is technically possible to get by without it there are a lot of places which currently don't have an easily implementable high-tech solution (such as leaving a note on the fridge for your flat mate).

It sounds to me like the author's child could be dyslexic or dyspraxic (I'm dyslexic) and could use some extra help. The extra help I got in school helped me mostly with the mechanics of writing, spelling and grammar rather than thinking issues. But, that was what I needed.

I think maybe she should be complaining more about her son's teacher's attitude than some emphasis on writing at school.

A lot of comments already, but I'll just make two points:

1. I suspect that a lot of what's being trained in handwriting classes is not just the ability to make legible versions of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, but rather general skills of hand positioning and fine motor control. Kids need to pick these skills up one way or another.

2. Regardless of whether you can "take notes" with a keyboard just as well as you can with a pen and pad, I'm pretty sure it's damn near impossible to do complicated mathematics without a pen and pad. Or a blackboard.

I'm pretty sure it's damn near impossible to do complicated mathematics without a pen and pad.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295110

I [Thad Starner] get much more down than anybody writing on pen and paper, because you can write, at maximum, about 25 words per minute. I can type 70. So I am much more complete in my notes. I also type LaTeX math notation. So that means if you have something highly technical, you will get book-quality-formatted notes out of me.

I'm talking about doing mathematics, not just taking down the notation.

Sure, I can type LaTeX too, but once I've typed an equation it still looks like a mess. The structure isn't obvious. It's not intuitively obvious how to eliminate some terms and rearrange it, the way it would be if I were writing it down longhand.

Would I be correct in supposing that you tried Mathematica?

I recently got a letter that was written in a really artful, beautiful handwriting. It was pure joy, reading this work of art. It would have been beautiful even if the words didn't make any sense. I wish I could write even remotely as beautifully... Banning handwriting would be a terrible loss.

Might as well not learn to read either. While we're at it learning words is hard, lets cut about half of them out. I could replace half the words I use with grunts and get by just fine.

My handwriting is awful. I avoid it if i can, but its a bad idea to not teach kids handwriting.

While we're at it, we should switch all the keyboard layouts to Dvorak.

In the spirit of this article, I have found a number of other things which are no longer needed in the school curriculum and serve only to stress incoming student.

1. Writing (already mentioned): Seriously, hard stuff and obsoleted by keyboards.

2. Reading: reading is hard, you need to know hundreds of thousands if not millions of words and exactly what they look like. Obsoleted by screen readers.

3. Arithmetic: Boring, terminally boring, requires memorization of multiple tables or an understanding of the very basic concepts behind it and makes people hate maths. Obsoleted by computers.

4. Algebra: Not terribly difficult (unless you are a math major) and nobody really uses it. Besides, we have mathematica.

5. Calculus: See point 4.

6. Mathematics: See point 5.

7. History: Long, hard, requires memorizing information on so many dead people. What is the point. Obsoleted by books (or audiotapes as the need arises).

8. Science: Seriously, have you seen physics. Soooo hard. Obsoleted by computers.

9. Schools: After points 1-8 what does this do anymore?

10. Thinking: Oops. Still waiting for MIT.

While I don't agree with the article, it's not 100% fair to compare the requirement of this motor (or communications) skill with all those unrelated studies of human knowledge.

There could be school without any of that stuff, and still be useful: philosophy, ethics, comparative religion, psychology (personal and social), logic and rhetoric, and perhaps an extra language or four.... Teaching should start with the "why" of life, not the "how." I mean, you can throw science and history courses in there, but they're really just "here's a bunch of facts that came from the past that you must regurgitate", so their value in enabling clear thought is low (unless, with science, you actually started by teaching the scientific method, then required students to verify anything that was taught using redundant, double-blind experiments...)

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