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Comment by duifullg | Hacker News Reader

You can make the case than learning almost anything “useless” will help you with something else than everyone considers useful nowadays.

Cursive helps with fine motor control. Chess helps you with memorization. Using an abacus might help with both.

That’s not the point. The point is kids have a limited time. I don’t want my kids to learn cursive or the abacus because that will take time off from stuff that’s almost surely more relevant. Perhaps I’m wrong and learning with an abacus is the best use of their time.

I hated cursive with a passion and some of my teachers forced me to use it at different points of my primary education. It was falling out of fashion then and only the hardcore old-timers thought it should be forced upon children. I wrote a perfectly legible print, but for them I just HAD to do it their way

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I think people massively overestimate what kids are willing to do or capable of.

Kids are stupid. Like really dumb, not even just not well informed (they are entirely uninformed) but also wildly illogical and without strategy. They do by brute force. Unable to appraise tasks and split them into smaller pieces.

I don't think many get to use an abacus these days but if you do you'll see an abacus makes visual the way numbers can be split into digits for addition and subtraction.

Believe it or not at one point in your life that wasn't so deeply rooted into your soul that it seems alien and a colossal insight.

To kids the sums of numbers might as well have been plucked from thin air.

Every time there is an attempt to teach kids "useful" maths there's a backlash that it's too hard. That parents can't manage it. New Maths, Common Core.

Add to that 50% have IQ below the mean ( of course).

The (of course) is true of the median, not the mean.

Of course. Glad to be corrected.

Clearly I need to hit the abacas harder to bone up on my averages!

I wholeheartedly disagree with the "kids are stupid" comment. They just have no experience. I've coached 4-5yo kid soccer. With guidance and instruction and lots of practice, they went from wanting to kick the ball as hard as they could to dribbling the ball in total control in one season. Some of them had better skills/ball control than some of their older siblings that were not taught the same way. All they needed was to be shown how, encouragement to keep at it, and someone willing with the time to do it with them.

It wasn't until this team (I had coached older kids prior) that I immediately understood why people became coaches/teachers. The look on their faces when they realized they could do something. It was the pride of a parent multiplied by each player.

In my view fine motor control is actually very important, as it seems to have a big effect on neuroplasticity and the prevention of Parkinson's.

I also want my kids to learn how to appreciate things that have no tangible purpose other than be beautiful.

I think it's a shame though that you were forced to use cursive when you hated it. Although where I grew up writing cursive used to be the norm. But it's not anymore apparently, as my son is learning non-cursive first.

>as my son is learning non-cursive first.

Is non-cursive different than print? Didn't everyone learn to print before learning cursive?

No, I just didn't know what it's called.

And no, I never learned print at school, only cursive. I started writing in print as a teenager because I thought it looked cooler, but it took me some time to get used to it.

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