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Comment by belugacat | Hacker News Reader

Yes. From the article:

> “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.

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My son could print perfectly legibly about age 7, then the schools tarted forcing letter shapes that were far harder to read with loops and smears etc.

His handwriting then devolved into a spidery mess which was impossible to read, which meant that marks started slipping.

Joined up handwriting is a disgusting unrequired curse on society. If you want to do "beautiful calligraphy" (unreadable scrawl) that's fine, have an optional class.

I had perfectly joined up handwriting by that same age. They should've let your son continue to use his perfectly legibly print but that doesn't mean that calligraphy is necessarily unreadable, just that your son was bad at it.

The cursive hand they taught when I was in elementary school was just ugly as sin and hard to read. Has a name, I forget, it’s the one that’s been standard in most US schools for decades, all linked up loops and curves, hardly a straight line in sight. I read once that it looks a ton better and the strokes are better-motivated if you’re using a nib pen, because lots of the back sides of loops get a thinner line which improves legibility, and the style helps orient the nib the right way as you go, which I hope is the case because otherwise I have no clue why anyone would have ever liked it or selected it to teach children

I’ve seen tons of others that are simpler, closer to print writing, and much easier to read (fewer extra loops and hoops on letters, crap like that) and I wish they’d taught us one of those, if they had to teach us cursive.

Last time this was discussed on HN, I was surprised how 'loopy' the standard American handwriting style taught in schools was.

In Britain it's much less fancy [1]. It's also normal to use a fountain pen from around age 7 — at least, I did in the 1990s, and they're still widely sold in shops. These examples seem to be pencil and a rollerball pen though.

(For more images, search "joined up writing primary school" as young children don't often use the word "cursive".)

[1] https://skidbyprimaryschool.org.uk/curriculum-intent/english... (Year 1 = age 5-6, Year 6 = age 10-11).

Is he left handed? I had a similar experience, being left handed writing cursive at 2nd grade at 7-8 caused me to almost fail by 3rd grade (my parents switched me to a private learning disability school…which was super easy).

Yeah, I honestly don't see the point of learning one set style as long as the letters are sufficiently legible. I would rather see children try out a few types of handwriting/multiple letter forms per letter and let them pick what they find appealing and can reproduce legibly and quickly letter by letter.

I had this issue growing up, except it was cyrillic. Reading cursive cyrillic is its own beast of an undertaking, but writing it is hell on earth and I wouldn't wish it upon by greatest enemy. They'd even refuse to grade anything handed in in non-cursive, which never made sense to me because doesn't it fucking suck to attempt to grade those papers when it's all just very long squiggles? Seriously the letters šćčti and Dž all look identical in cursive, and many words have a lot of words have these letters one after the other so you just end up with loop after loop, it's ridiculous

Fast forward a decade and I can barely read cursive cyrillic anymore and I definitely can't write in cursive, thank god.

Did you also have to use a fountain pen for that? I did. It was a nightmare, considering we could allow only the cheap pens and I’m not even sure if there were any better ones in regular stores.

For completely unrelated reasons though I had been practicing my handwriting some time ago. I greatly improved in it and even developed several different handwritings. It’s fun.

Possibly because things such as:

https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

didn't get grandfathered in, but more likely because teachers just search for:

https://www.google.com/search?q=handwriting+worksheets

and grab the first free result.

That said, I would recommend:

https://www.handwritingrepair.info/

and

https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books

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

Eh, who knows what 'vetted for accuracy' means to this guy?

I mean, is Wikipedia allowed? What about Khan Academy, this Sal Khan guy doesn't hold even the lowest swedish teacher's qualification.

And that's without getting into the vetting of history textbooks.

I can well believe the rush to online learning during the pandemic lead to the use of material some people would consider unvetted.

> And that's without getting into the vetting of history textbooks.

Do you mind clarifying this part?

Not the OP but depending on where you live - people have a different interpretation of history and may not agree on all the various educational texts out there.

That's just putting it lightly.

I think what they might be implying is that electronics make it very easy for teachers to rely on potentially inaccurate sources on the internet. Rather than that there aren't vetted sources that are acceptable to use (there probably are).

I somewhat tend to agree, assuming that the quality of teachers in Sweden is comparable to my own experience. In hindsight many teachers I had (especially for earlier grades) weren't likely to be better than the average rando taken off the street when it comes to vetting the material they use.

Only upon getting to university did it finally seem like the free/open source materials some professors liked to use were vetted.

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

Maybe to train the kids in vetting materials themselves? Seems like an important skill. It's incredible that in school you're never confronted two contradictory sources of information and have to decide which is right.

Yes, that's it. They talk a lot about how to find reliable sources, because they know students are going to look on the internet either way.

The main point of my history lessons at school was looking at different sources (primary, secondary etc) and assessing them for bias.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z6gv6v4/articles/zxqss... (for age 11-14, not sure exactly which year this page is aimed at).

> "...knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy...”

Wikipedia?

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