Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools

The other day I was writing poetry at my computer and I had a Slack message pop up. I immediately clicked on it and responded, and then I went back to my poem and had totally lost my train of thought.

I am not suggesting schools use typewriters, but I wonder if there is value in considering limited functionality devices for specific classes in schools and similar situations.

I am glad that my child has been able to go to a school that only uses computers for tasks that can't practically be done otherwise (CAD for 3d printing, move editing, etc). Everyting else has been analog. Real books, real paper, writing by hand (cursive, even). Zero cell phones in elementary school by any kid. This is in silicon valley, so every kid has one or both parents in tech, so there is broad understanding of how problematic it is to let it dominate over the real world.

It's quite universal to find that schools in your own country are terrible :)

Having lived (and raised children) in multiple countries, I can tell you I've never seen a country where people would say good things about their own education systems

Not sure why... probably simply because everybody has (good !) ideas on how it could be better, but they are not easy to implement ! :). Probably also because that's really something people care about

What the actual fuck.

> “We believe the focus should return to acquiring knowledge through printed textbooks and teacher expertise, rather than acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy,” said the institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research.

Why were schools using unvetted materials in the first place!?

> it's not technology per se that's the problem

That said, handwriting practice is correlated to developing fine motor skills, which are documented to be in decline in children in a number of countries. Excessive time with (touch)screens is terrible on that front.

I think this is highly likely given what they are cutting back on is “independent online research.”

Thankfully every student will soon have a very knowledgeable, perfectly patient and available teacher: ChatGPT. At first I was skeptical schools will use them, since they don't tend to understand technology very well, but I think some schools will see the potential to relieve the pressure on their teachers and others will follow when they see the positive outcomes for students.

If allowed, ChatGPT will also allow teachers to spend less time on administrative tasks, which is one of the reasons why they're so burned out in the first place.

My challenge with standardized learning models is they work for those they work for, and cut down and ground down those it doesn’t. Then the beneficiaries write the rules for the next generation oblivious to the possibility that their experience isn’t the only one. I really struggled in American public school which is rife with learning style assumptions. I really hope a time comes when neurodiversity is accepted in public education, but until then I’ll keep sending my daughter to a private school that adopts a differentiated teaching style.

I've never been a person who doodles. I may underline or highlight, but that's about it. I keep trying hand journaling and handwritten note taking. I'm not particularly slow or sloppy, but it just doesn't click the same way as the keyboard.

I guess the grass is always greener, isn't it?

I realise this isn't what you said, of course. Maybe you don't do this.

I cannot remember a single person complaining about a heavy rucksack when I was in school a decade ago - by 13 we had CCF so had to go hiking with much heavier bags on the weekends. At 15.5 you can join the military schools and you’ll be carrying 25kg. This shouldn’t be a worry unless you’re physically disabled or something. Duke of Edinburgh involves hiking 13k a day with all your camping equipment and food at 12 years old over a weekend. Etc…

I would note of the things you listed: pen, paper, good teacher, almost all the alpha is associated with the teacher. And while the pen and the paper can be bought, a good teacher is only born.

https://redbooth.com/blog/handwriting-and-memory

I’d like to counter with “perfect is the enemy of good”. Knowing when to half-ass something can be a skill in of itself.

A famous man whose name I forget once said "Plans are useless, planning is indispensable," and I would like to paraphrase it as "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."

I'm over 40 and I was never taught that- not at school and certainly not at home.

My perspective is that there is an ever growing wealth of knowledge and skills and only so much time in the day. We see this conflict in some hardcore parents who sign their kids up for an entire childhood of studies.

I think it’s deeply important to have pride in your work and to do it carefully, patiently, methodically. I’m not sure this must be practiced with any specific skill.

I think doctors are an example of how this can be at odds with reality. Do they not take pride in their work, or do they have just so much to study that they cannot afford the expense?

I think it’s also important to identify that this discussion often conflates two things: cursive handwriting and legible printing. I believe schools still endeavour to teach kids to print legibly.

You aren't alone, but I think this is terrible advice. You should figure out what you want to do and find the best way to do it. The best way will probably involve half-assing a lot of stuff, since you only have a finite amount of time/energy.

I had a teacher at school who used to say "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing properly", but he mainly said it about things that weren't worth doing.

They are probably much better than your grandfather at both game and meta-game, because they are standing on the shoulders of slightly larger people. They are familiar with the conventions and input methods and community and thus have a base understanding that few older people do.

Powerful argument for Sloyd Woodworking instruction coming back to schools:

https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...

>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others

See my other post in this discussion for a link to Kate Gladstone's site and as well as SE Briem's list of calligraphy texts.

A touchstone for me on this is John Quincy Adams' translation of Wieland's Oberon:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/458794

which it is well worth finding a facsimile copy of.

Or see:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/21860485@N06/albums/7215764113...

One thing to try, would be to have the child write thank you notes.

You mean so they can work 60 hours for a mediocre salary with little upwards mobility that won't even let them buy a house anymore while sinking in student debt?

Knowing when work for the sake of work is a waste of your life is a very important skill now that you can't walk into a random company Monday morning and come out with a job

Then, wait a week, and take a test without reviewing anything.

My money, based on my experience, is on you better remembering the handwritten notes. I think this is because you cannot write as fast as you type, so you have to hear, think about what is important, and summarize when handwriting. When typing, you can get almost all the words someone says typed out. So you switch to "hear-to-type" mode without thinking.

So, I think it is important for learning to have that skill. I think it is better in the real world too, for some use cases. If I am in a meeting with a counterparty, I take hand written notes. I rarely look at the notes after. Why? I remember what we talked about.

I used to bring a computer and type out notes - and I still do if I need perfect information to reference later - but when I do that, my notes take the place of my memory.

It seems more efficient to handwrite my notes and have my memory be my memory instead.

Maybe you'd have more luck teaching him the latter if you focused on skills/work that are clearly useful. Or useful to him atleast even if you disagree that handwriting is outdated.

Take pride in your work and doing it well is a useful lesson (and unfortunately not something I'm great at personally) but if he doesn't see any value in that specific work he'll never even comprehend the difference between work done well and work half-assed, never mind strive for it. All he see's is you asking him to put more effort into a pointless activity.

I reckon this is one of the reasons that sports and arts are relatively successful at teaching kids life skills like discipline. It's easier for kids to see the immediate value of being good at those than other skills, so their more motivated and lessons stick.

We purchased some material from Dianne Craft to help with his dysgraphia: https://diannecraft.org/dysgraphia-what-is-dysgraphia/

The exercises definitely helped.

My problem was exacerbated because I sat next to a kid who was a great artist. He used to draw comic strips (at age 9-10) and the lettering looked professional (at least to my eyes). Yes if I had spent an enormous amount of time and effort I could have improved my handwriting but I don't think I'd ever be able to produce 1/5th the quality of what he did. My hand just wasn't (and isn't) that steady.

With other subjects you can spend a lot less time and improve quality a lot easier and faster. With something like code layout it's much easier to brute force tidiness in a way that just isn't possible with handwriting (or drawing).

I also had terrible handwriting despite tons of experience. Meanwhile I knew kids who wrote like typewriters from the 4th grade just due to natural talent.

This seems fairly contradictory to me. He's not choosing to do it, he's forced to learn some outdated skill. Let him excel in some useful skill, like mathematics.

All education is a crude attempt at telepathy and while repeated confrontation can transport the value you place upon a thing, it does not make it intrinsic. Also skills are filtered for right to exist every generation. Skills become value less is a normal and even healthy thing.

Your grandfathers advice might have been sane back in the day when you could only do one or two things and so quickly hit diminishing returns, but today it does not matter greatly.

More emotional argument. What do you call the person who does more than they get rewarded for (over a long time?): a sucker. And who wants to be a sucker?

Now that they're in high school, my daughter has excellent penmanship. My son... not so much. :) But! He can do it.

Starting with grade 1 the kids wrote exclusively with fountain pens, and were marked early on on penmanship. Except in English, where they were allowed to write with pencils or biros so of course they did because it was a change, and the teachers didn't seem to care about penmanship at all.

Two decades later his writing with a fountain pen in any language is as clear as a bell, while anything else results in a scrawl. I don't believe it's because the tool is superior in some way, I think it's simply the attention to detail got wired in.

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An amusing nerd side point: In grade 1 they learnt a letter a week, and from that were reading by xmas. To avoid confusing the kids, English was supposed to use "German letterforms" but really they are pretty much the same! Anyway the funny thing is that in English they start the first week with "A" (Apple, Ant), then "B" (Banana, Buffalo) and so on. German was taught in the alphabetic frequency order: "E" (Elefant), then "N" (Nase), "I" (Igel) and so on. Disappointingly, Christmas came before they got to ß as I was curious what they would do (no word starts with it).

You and I both have terrible handwriting. In my life, it hasn't been a hindrance to my work as a software engineer so maybe your son has a point. However, I do agree that doing things well has merit but maybe reframing it will get you farther along this goal. And lastly, maybe you can achieve the same goal through other means? Perhaps in playing an instrument or practicing some other skill. I think the value you want to teach your son is practicing something and doing it well. It doesn't need to be handwriting.

Then you insist that they do it well.

But that's not enough - you also insist that they have to want to do it well.

Which you also can't justify, other than very abstractly, by insisting that everything they do - including things they didn't choose themselves, don't care about, don't find useful and won't actually find useful - they should want to do well.

I'd be more worried for someone who didn't find that preposterous.

You only have a limited number of hours in life to devote to acquiring mastery, and there's a nearly unlimited number of subjects that are worth mastering.

Instead of trying to be good at everything you're doing, decide what you're going to be good at, what you're going to outsource and half-ass, and work towards being good at the former, while getting by/paying other people to do with the latter.

You need to take pride in something, but you're fooling yourself if you think you can do everything well - or that its a good investment of your time.

Maybe instead of forcing him to become an expert at a skill with incredibly poor return on investment, you should drive him towards becoming an expert at... Writing.

I will still take notes and write my thoughts out on paper. It somehow manages to provide me focus and shut out distractions. It’s also a space I can do a lot of free form thinking and tie things together.

Assists shouldn’t be given at an early age. I believe they are counter productive.

Another example. We never used calculators till 11th grade. All calculations had to be done by hand. I can still quickly approximate to know if numbers are in the ballpark.

Cursive handwriting was not optional, same for spelling. Teachers would flunk people and no, there are no repeats at that school. From 200 in kinder, only 70 finished HS

You are on the right side, find people who give a damn about education.

Also, I really enjoy watching a thought literally flow out of my body onto a page. There is something very disconnected about pressing keys on a keyboard to see the words appear on a screen -- sometimes I find myself in a state of flow on a computer where it all seems to 'click', but contrast that with handwriting and I can get right into flow the instant graphite or ink meets paper.

There is nothing redeeming about artisanal hand scripting other than writing annotations on objects to label them, and even then a label maker does a better job in every dimension. Typing is a fundamental skill in the modern world, and type written text is not just considerably more legible, it’s also indexable for search etc.

Having a sense of pride is often coupled with a sense of utility and purpose. Few people feel pride in useless exercises done for rote purposes and celebration of the way it was done in the past. Some certainly do, and god bless them. But I feel more pride in my code than artisanal scribbles, in my handiwork, in my learning, etc. Kids are no different. Maybe they feel pride in their Minecraft creations. Is a complex red stone build with intricate visual designs and creative use in game not more compelling and interesting than manipulating a wood stick to make glyphs? A lot of people think the things a kid takes pride in aren’t worth taking pride in, and instead try to make them take pride in something from their own childhood.

They are misidentifying a lack of interest in your interests with a lack of pride in their work.

If you want your kid to practice high quality craftsmanship, to feel pride in a job well-done, let him choose another craft where the quality is inherently relevant, like woodworking or sewing (or calligraphy)!

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A second angle. Imagine you are trying to learn to write code and someone insisted you use a difficult keyboard: each key is a different size, they're spaced out across the desk facing different directions. (Or, say, insisted you use punch cards). You'll surely have a harder time learning to code!

You can post anything online and get global feedback (at least in theory, people are silo-ing more everyday). You can see others get harsh feedback. There's youtube channels dedicated to tearing apart X Y and Z products for their flaws.

Unfortunately the internet returns most people to the mean or average, within a bell curve. There's some incredible knowledge online, but it's not enough to replace a critical university teacher leaning over your shoulder, or working under a master craftsman and enduring his continual destruction of your failed attempts. Standards are hard won.

Holding an internal standard and conscience has been subverted upvotes/downvotes and by the internet in general, in my view.

Hypotheticaly subtract internet points and approval seeking from the online world, and you'll see the idea of a individual standard re-emerge, I bet.

Edit: Handwriting is super important. Typing on keyboards has an arbitrary mapping between action and outcome. Handwriting directly connects your muscles and mind together and gives permenancy to your handiwork that forces consideration. I keep a diary, by hand. I cross out mistakes and initial them. Best habit in my life, would not trade it for the world. Any serious thoughts I need to 'get out' or improve, go there.

Cursive truly is an outdated skill. When the forms really matter, they say please print -- and they do that for legibility.

But I haven't had opportunity to see much people typing for a while until last year. Just last week I saw two people working at a bank not able to type numbers on the numpad without looking and using one finger. Both of them around 25. The optician could not touch type, was using a fast version of hunt and peck with three fingers total. Also around 25. But the dentists and doctors could touch-type pretty fast. All of them 40 - 60. (I started working as a personal assistant part time so see a lot of medical people, Sweden)

The blackboard ones though, with carefully prepared notes by the lecturer... I'd write it all down, and would hardly ever had to look at them again as it stuck right away. However, I did have to write it down.

Also, you walked to school -many- days? Good to be you, as I walked to school every day throughout all my life, including to University.

Slides are entirely appropriate, especially if the teacher is teaching the same class multiple times per day.

Handwriting similarly. You can write even when there is no computer around, or when power is down. I also believe the argument that it enhances motoric-skills.

And reading? Do we really need to learn reading when we can just ask Siri to read it out loud for us?

Computer-skills of course are valuable too.

If you want to get kids on board:

Don't bring back the old things; make new things that are more tactile. Advance them in new ways. For example, instead of using iPads - invest in advanced e-ink tech to bring better digital books to schools.

The piano example is an exception because, you can't really replace musical instruments.

But mechanical type-writers? Why not just invest in better mechanical keyboards, rather than the cheap membrane ones you see in schools so much?