Also we do not know if those kids are better at skills that are more relevant today -- coding, social media marketing, deciding between health insurance and bread.
Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.
I've heard that anecdotally from college professors and I've seen it in my zoomer friends.
And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction.
Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.
Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.
Eg Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will eat alive nearly anything written today, it accurately critiques a future it never saw like a laser beam cutting across time. Few if any works today possess such original and enduring foresight.
This is especially true as a generation of people are now getting deskilled by AI. Even if we have the writers capable of such feats, we likely lack the audience for those works because that requires a societal sophistication we may have lost. And so those works may never be adequately appreciated to let them ever break out of this little moment in time.