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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday November 02 2016, @08:33AM
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
The New Yorker wonders:
My children know how to print their letters. And they type frighteningly well. Still, I can't escape the conviction that cursive—writing it and knowing how to read it—represents some universal value. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Every year, there are worried articles about the decline of cursive and its omission from school curricula. And there's a backlash, one that I secretly cheer for. When I read that Washington state is now considering Senate Bill 6469, "an act related to requiring that cursive writing be taught in common schools," I gave a little fist pump in the air.
Cursive and handwriting are dead. Communication of the future will be done with pure emoticons.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:40AM
Some education is more transferable though. At least typewriter class is transferable to modern keyboards.
I am a self taught typist, but I could have taken typing in school - I did computing instead which was probably more useful, and cooking (because I like eating...)
My wife on the other hand cannot type (except with one finger) and often moans that she was not allowed to learn typing in her school because it was considered a skill only for mere secretaries and pupils from her school were intended for much better careers than that.
Moral: educators don't know the future any better than anyone else and should concentrate on transferable skills and fundamental knowledge and scientific method - keyboards of any sort may be gone (or not) in another few years, whilst Pythagoras' theorem and Archimedes principle are as relevant and useful today as two thousand years ago, and extremely unlikely to be going away any time soon (as is also true of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle).
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:34PM
I highly doubt it, because the alternative is either less quick and less reliable on-screen keyboards, or "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @05:00PM
Yes, there's some subjects we know will continue to matter, but in a lot of cases, that transferability is not obvious. You mention typing, but if one surveyed futurists at the time you were in school, would they have predicted that the computers of the 2000s would still use keyboards? Or would they have suggested that voice input was more likely? (Siri, Echo, et al. show we may finally be headed that way, but it took longer and is still less pervasive than a lot of people thought.) Or maybe even that handwriting recognition would be key, and we'd all be scribbling notes on the screen with light-pens or styli? (The Newtons and Palms made a good shot at that, for a while. I expected it to come back when phones with digitizers (e.g. Galaxy Note series) appeared, but apparently that idea has come and gone for good.)
At this point, with 30+ years of home/personal/mobile computers all using keyboards (even phones, with on-screen QWERTY keyboards remaining far more popular than any of the alternative input methods designed for touchscreens), I feel very sure that keyboarding will remain a useful skill for at least a lifetime. But then again, who in the 1960s or 70s wouldn't have looked at the centuries of handwriting and felt equally confident? There's a lesson we should all be cautious about overconfidence in our own or others' predictions.
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:05PM
I was, I suppose, an OK typist (for hunt-and-peck) from having typed programs in from magazines, but the typing class I took in high school improved on that to where I can probably still manage 55-60 wpm if I had a wall of text to type in. Knowing how to use correcting tabs and fluid and how to make carbon copies isn't so useful anymore, but touch-typing will remain a useful skill for the foreseeable future. (Hell, Wite-Out was already on the way out with typewriters that would correct within the last few letters with the press of a key. My typing class was full of IBM Correcting Selectric IIIs with that capability.)
While it was fun to have an hour in the day to goof off with the computers, there wasn't much I learned in computer classes that was of continuing relevance. The very first one that I took in 8th grade introduced word processing (among other things), but other than that, what I was doing on my own at home was far beyond what any of my teachers knew about.