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I saw a news report today stating people are pushing to eliminate handwriting from standard elementary curricula, stating that it is a “hardly used skill.” This is an incredibly foolish perspective. There is no better way to speed the process of an already clear inability of modern children to interact with the REAL world.

Let’s start with something about why people want to give up on handwriting. I found an article stating an unnamed professor believes handwriting is “too slow a technology for the modern life.” Moreover, the article claims handwriting is “hardly used.”

Let’s be very VERY clear about this: I work on the web. I spend much of my time typing. I write things by hand daily. DAILY.

If handwriting is hardly used, then what is the gauge? I find this claim, handwriting is hardly used, so offensive I had visions of slapping every person that has ever uttered those very words. The consideration is that children should spend more time working on their typing skills than working on their handwriting.

This is is a sure sign of complete incompetence in the field of education. To claim keyboarding skills are superior to handwriting skills is akin to claiming calculator skills are superior to mathematics skills.

People that espouse either of these views are idiots and should be culled from the ranks of the education workforce.

This is incompetence and laziness. Let’s review just a few things that handwriting is key for:

Test Taking
Lists
Annotating documents
Recording thoughts on the run
Meeting notes
Class notes

Let’s look at something really crucial: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN POWER GOES OUT??

See, here’s the thing, these “educators” if we can even call them that, seem to think that computers will ALWAYS be available. This is a foolish worldview. This is the worldview of someone that is, honestly, too stupid to be allowed to live.

How do they remember to breathe?

Computers work great as long as you HAVE ELECTRICITY.

See, electricity isn’t just magical stuff that appears wherever you need it. It is delivered over a man-made network from a man made plan which PRODUCES electricity. Apparently nobody clued these classroom dopes into that fact. Have they never noticed that the power goes out from time to time?

Suppose you… I dunno… go for a hike? I’m sure you can just stop, whip out that computer and make a couple of notes. That’s totally convenient. Perhaps not.

Let’s consider another item: COMPUTERS FAIL.

Wait, what? You mean computers aren’t infallible? No, you fucking halfwit, they aren’t. Suppose you are typing something you would have hand-written before and your computer crashes? Now what? One of a kind notes, these were. No backup exists. No way to retrieve them is available. They are just gone. You’re fucked.

Congrats, by encouraging computer skills over essential skills, you may have just ruined someone’s career. How do you feel now, asshole?

I could go on like this for hours. Suffice to say, I have enough venom for every one of these dim-witted de-educators, but I think this might be a good place to stop.

In the end, the problem with encouraging students to strengthen peripheral skills over fundamental skills, you set the students up for failure. Not just failure in the short term, but failure in life. Before you decide to encourage your child or class to set their pencils down and move, wholesale, to the computer, perhaps you should consider if you are comfortable destroying their futures, because you will.

If you have a problem with anything I’ve said, perhaps you need to seriously consider your motivation. Are you truly trying to prepare students for the world or are you simply looking for the easy way out, opting for the lazy, bullshit method over actually TEACHING something.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 5:54 pm and is filed under General Blogging, Web Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.