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Comment by IcyWindows | Hacker News Reader

Objectively, how important are those lost skills?

I don't disagree that fine motor skills are important, but I don't know for sure if they are still needed like they used to be.

Skills needed for daily life change as culture develops.

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I take a bit of an orthogonal view myself: the skills themselves don't matter nearly as much as the resilience necessary to build them. Consumer tech focuses a lot on low-friction interactions that abstract away challenges. Sometimes those challenges are pointless, but sometimes they're not. If you take away all the challenges everywhere, you end up with someone who's fragile to the tiniest random bumps in life.

I think this is true the value of extracurricular activities like sports and art. There's no way to shortcut those skills. The struggle is part of the experience. Every violin player will sound like a dying cat their first year. Every would-be baseball pitcher will make awful throws when playing catch with their dad. But they get better with time, and in the process internalize that they're capable of doing so.

Fine motor skills in a broad sense are building block skills, just like reading(which is also declining). It opens up the opportunity for learning more complex skills. Unless we want to go the route of being 100% automated pampering content consumers like in Wall-E, we should keep up the baseline skills.

With my kids, one of my main priorities was just making sure they knew that things were available and possible. Even if they never got into drawing or painting, we did them to show that painting or woodworking weren't some mysterious process. If you never do things with your hands, you won't have those potential areas of expression available to you.

If you want to just extirpate things like music and art then yeah, it's fine if nobody knows how to use their fingers.

Those who need fine motor skills can still learn them.

It’s kinda like why they make compsci majors take a history class - the actual knowledge may not be particularly useful unto itself, but learning that information/skill tickles a part of the brain you dont normally use. So that later, when you need to use your whole brain to solve some problem, all parts of it are strong.

So are the skills themselves important? Not per se, but they represent “meta skills” that we want kids to develop when they are most apt to learn.

Ultimately, I think it’s a big TBD - a child’s mind innately wants to learn, it’s just unclear what kids are learning when exposed to so much tech early on and that’s what has teachers worried. I bet the kids will turn out fine, but we as a society won’t really know until the kids are old enough to tell us firsthand.

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