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by pier25·4mo ago·view on hn ↗
I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.

After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left.

In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech and then removing it will be quite obvious. This will be studied for decades to come. Reminds me of the Dutch kids that were borm during the 1944-1945 Dutch famine.

https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/moore-institute/dutc...

14 comments
>I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.

I think we should use tech in education, but in a targeted way. It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.

The real problem is separating reading/writing skills from tech skills. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting just because typing exists. And being able to read long books and essays teaches fundamental cognitive skills like attention, focus, and information processing.

That's not using tech that you're describing here. You're talking about literally learning some basic computer skills (such as word processor, excel, reading email, some basic website building, use printer, and some amount of programming)

For those, obviously you need a computer and completely agree that those are important skills to learn... But you maybe need to spend 1h/week during last 2 years of middle school on those at the computer lab (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)

But for any other course such as Math, English (or whichever primary language in your country), second languages, history, etc. : that's where using tech is a mistake

A bit of tech is ok, but it cannot be "everyone does their homework and read lesson on a iPad/Chromebook"

I am pretty skeptical about the value of learning to build websites. I think it is too tempting for students to devote significant time to something that is not foundational knowledge and where they won't get any valuable feedback anyway.

It makes me think back to my writing assignments in grades 6-12. I spent considerable time making sure the word processor had the exact perfect font, spacing, and formatting with cool headers, footers, and the footnotes, etc. Yet, I wouldn't even bother to proofread the final text before handing it in. What a terrible waste of a captive audience that could have helped me refine my arguments and writing style, rather than waste their time on things like careless grammatical errors.

Anyway, I do agree with the idea of incorporating Excel, and even RStudio for math and science as tools, especially if they displace Ed-tech software that adds unnecessary abstractions, or attempts to replace interaction with knowledgeable teachers. One other exception might be Anki or similar, since they might move rote memorization out of the classroom, so that more time can be spent on critical thinking.

Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom, or 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up visual intuition? Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python? Should kids be forced to use physical copies of newspapers and journal articles instead of learning how to look things up in a database?

I'm all for going back to analog where it makes sense, but it seems wrongheaded to completely remove things that are relevant skills for most 21st century careers.

> (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)

I had computer lab in a catholic grade school in the mid-late 80's. Apple II's and the class was once a week and a mix of typing, logo turtle, and of course, The Oregon Trail.

what's funny is that they don't even teach basic tech literacy but just rely on kids to figure it out!
> how to touch type

What for? I've been writing computer programs and documentation since 1969 and I can't touch type. I've never felt enough pressure to do it. I can still type faster than I can think. When I'm writing most of my time is spent thinking not tapping the keys.

You typed out this message by hitting individual keys as your eyes searched for them? Isn’t that mentally exhausting?
Fast typing is not about throughput, it's about latency. If I only needed to type fast enough to produce the 125-something lines of code I get into production per week, I would be able to work at a word a minute. Alas, that's not how that works.

https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-no...

I learned how to touch type in middle school with school software like Mario teaches typing and Mavis beacon. I peaked around 80wpm and I was faster than 90% of my classmates.

A few years ago I invested in a rectilinear split keyboard which has a slightly different layout, but much more ergonomic. But interestingly I can now type 120wpm+.

I think touch typing is very similar to learning penmanship (and I guess cursive to an extent). If I followed the exact rules I learned about handwriting in school, I'd have much more legible handwriting but I'd write so much more slowly. Instead I my own way, which lets me get my thoughts out quickly, albeit not as neat as "correct" penmanship. Fortunately typing is much more lenient on this front.

In general, mastery involves taking the basic mechanics of something and making them completely automatic, freeing up cognitive resources for higher level processes. Expert pianists don't need to look down at their hands when sight reading.
> touch type

can even be harmful

IFF we interpret "touch typing" as the typical thought typing method and not just "typing without looking at the keyboard".

In general key arrangement traces back to physical limitations of type writers not ergonomics and layout choice isn't exactly ergonomic based either.

But even if it where, the biggest issue of touch typing is that it's often thought around the idea of your hands being somewhat orthogonal to your keyboard, _which they never should be_ (if you use a typical keyboard on a typcal desk setup) as it leads to angling you hands/wrist which is nearly guaranteed to cause you health issues long term if you are typing a lot.

The simple solution is to keep your wrist straight leading to using the keyboard in a way where you hand is at an angle to it's layout instead of orthogonal which in turn inhibits perfect touch typing. But still allows something close to it.

As keys are arranged in shifted columns this kinda works surprisingly well, an issue is the angle differs depending on left/right hand :/

Split or alice style keyboards can also help a bit, but I often feel man designs kinda miss the point. Especially many supposedly ergonomic keyboards aren't aren't really that ergonomic, especially if your hand is to large, small, or otherwise unusual...

Which brings us to the next point, human autonomy varies a lot, some people have just some very touch typing incompatible hands, like very short pinky fingers making that finger unusable for typical touch typing (even with normal hands it's a bit suboptimal which is why some keyboards shift the outer rows down by half a row).

Really? I can touch type and there is no way I can keep up with how fast I can think. Physics seems against you on this one.
> It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.

Some of us "a bit older" seem to have gone through a golden era of tech, where we actually learned that tech en-masse. In a class of maybe 30 students, around 20, 25 of them were able to configure dial up modems, come on IRC (servers, ports, channels needed to be configured) and do a bunch of other stuff our parents mostly considered "black magic" (except for a few tech enthusiasts), and the general concensus was, that every generation will know more and be "better" than the previous generation.

A few decades have passed.. and kids can't type anymore on a keyboard, can't print, have no idea what can be changed in the settings on their smartphone, don't know how to block ads, can't cheat in games anymore (except via pay-to-win) and have no idea where to change their instagram password.

So, now you have boomers, who can't use computers and kids, who can't use computers anymore.

Boomers are split between a demographic that is very computer literate, having worked in/around science and tech for decades, and a demo that isn't remotely literate and may not even be online.

The latter is a fairly small demo though - supposedly around a third.

The split is more by education than by age.

Kids can use computers - phones - as app appliances, but they don't understand computers.

Peak literacy is young Gen X and older millennials.

> It's important that children gain basic technical literacy

They certainly will at home.

> I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.

In which country?

I live in Mexico and even here you really need to go to the poorest families to find a home without a laptop. Even those families have multiple smartphones. Today a smartphone is not a good replacement for a laptop but maybe in a couple of years it will be.

Even if they have a computer at home, that doesn't mean they're practicing the relevant skills. Touch typing, word processing, researching a topic online, etc. are things that need deliberate practice. Based on my own experience, using a computer at home 99% of the time meant playing video games.

The following article suggests that in the United States, about 59% of lower income households have a laptop or desktop computer, compared to 92% of upper income households.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/22/digital-d...

Many parents don't themselves have the technical literacy to properly teach things like what thr filesystem is.
Just wanted to point out that you and other people who responded to you basically do agree on same points, you are just presenting it differently. I just find it amusing/endearing that we argue with each other even when we do agree on the core issue. :D
Touch typing is not a basic tech skill, and also pretty useless on the long term. I expect dictation to take over very soon, as finally voice recognition is getting to be usable, and commonplace.
> They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.

Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?

Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.

The difference is the task had to change as well. People were able to write thousands of pages (rather than a few stone blocks) over their education, and making full use of that ability in order to "keep the brain CPU close to 100%" was a necessary concurrent change in order to preserve cognitive devolpment.

At least around 370 BC, in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates expresses a strong opinion against writing of any kind through a conversation between the Egyptian gods Theuth and Thamus discussing the invention of writing.

Thamus:

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3894

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/#Pha

> Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.

You are forgetting that in 500 BC literacy rates were well under 10%. Nobody optimized for anyone’s cognitive development.

The only cognitive development people cared about was for the rich (aristocrats, royalty, some merchants, etc). Much of that happened orally through hands-on tutoring by an army of people specifically employed to create the next generation of leaders.

Anyone would thrive with that much resources thrown at them. And I’m pretty sure many of them considered reading and writing beneath them. They got people for that.

>Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?

there are countless of ways to develop fine motor skills, but handwriting replacing a chisel was not a step down because handwriting is a demanding task in contrast to the, by nature, impoverished interaction with digital rather than analog devices. I help in a maker-space and you can literally tell young people apart who only ever interacted with a phone compared to kids who play an instrument, work with tools etc.

Additionally a pen and paper come cheap compared to a tablet. It was always the perfect example of a kind of "digitalism". "oh we're so cool, we use technology, let's give everyone tablets, we're a modern country". Just expensive nonsense in the absence of educational standards and physical development.

Maybe not that early, but writing did eventually undermine the ability to memorise things. It used to be common for people to memorise long works - it is one reason why epic poetry was popular and designed to be memorable. Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.

I wonder whether it has contributed to the evolution of smaller brains: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...

> Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.

Memorizing a few hundred lines of epic poetry probably is indeed unusual. But I bet most people have more than a few hundred lines of poetry in the form of song lyrics memorized (along with the tune of the song).

> hack at stone with a chisel

Update your mental model, except for the grand works, they used sticks on clay tablets similar to writing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_tablet

Is it possible that the inherent inefficiency of handwriting in recording information is what facilitates cognitive development? Writing information by hand requires the writer to parse the information being written and become skilled in understanding the most important aspects of the information to write since it is impractical to handwrite everything verbatim as it comes to mind.
I'm a bit torn on this. The world changes and education needs to evolve with it. There was a time when recitation was considered a critical part of education. I'm sure there's a ton of cognitive development to be had by learning the entire bible by heart, but we seem to do fine without it.

I do think that digital technology was introduced a bad way in most schools. In my own experience it was less "digital technology education" and more "navigate Microsoft windows UI education". The teachers didn't know much about computers, of course the result was mostly a waste of time. I think the first thing kids should be taught in computer class is touch typing.

I mostly agree with you. But...

I have very bad handwriting due to dysgraphia. I suffered a lot in older years of school due to lack of ability to use Word/Latex homework to submit homework. Handwriting is not as important.

But what is exttenely important is ability to think with writing/drawing. Because at the end, paper is still the most free form of writing/drawingyou can do and actually creates and reinforces that individuals own style. Computers, however good you have them, at the end force students into one style of exposition which is the software you are using. Whether word or latex.

Paper allow you and force you to develop you own style of writing/organization information which is essentially what teaching is all about.

I do think the general purpose screens of today are doing a disservice for education. There are too many possible distractions a child isn't prepared to resist yet. But it could enable more advanced workflow for personalized learning.

I think the k-shaped economy where some people are financially succeeding while the rest go through hardship is a reflection of a k-shaped education system where those who are able to ignore the distractions and succeed are doing well. The top of the k can use more edtech as they just need tools for further educational attainment. Things modern edtech can bring. The bottom of the k has different needs.

Tech can save you from a bad educational environment. I think kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance on what are the best tools to be used for learning. From visualizing linear algebra and analytic geometry problems to piracy. If anything, the teachers need to improve their tech literacy.

There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.

> I think kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance on what are the best tools to be used for learning.

Why an "extreme" amount of freedom?

> There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.

Yes there is. Students were educated just a couple decades ago without it. We can easily return to that style.

>Why an "extreme" amount of freedom?

As dangerous as this sounds, with guidance, I think it could be done. Government and public institutions love to lock the environment into something safe but useless for further learning and adaptability

Written language is deep tech itself. There's evidence it changed our brain morphology even. So ya it deeply affected kids abilities, for example memorizing long poems or whatever.

Digital tech is here to stay...

> After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.

I have several friends who work in education.

At one point there were computer labs in school, there was education around computing. The pervasiveness of computing killed these programs, along with various kinds of skill based classes, like wood/auto/home economics (cooking and or sewing).

All of them tend to agree that the losses of these programs is, in hindsight, problematic. Many of them think that a return to computer education (and conveying deeper insight) would be a net positive.

> EdTech

To a person, every one I know thinks their EdTech platforms suck. One of them is in a support role as part of their job and often tells me stories of how lamentable the software and faculties interactions with it is/are.

"Progress is at fault" is a tale as old as time: https://xkcd.com/1227/

"Progress is at fault" only is a criticism of the criticism if it's actually progress. What if actually being forced to slow down and think about a thing is what actually makes you learn it, and anything designed to optimize a process removes its educational value? If that were true, would "EdTech" still be progress?
I imagine it would depend case by case on exactly what parts were optimized and how. Presumably it's possible to optimize for more time spent thinking as well as for thinking about more useful things.
> "Progress is at fault" is a tale as old as time

Worth noting that all of those examples are adjacent to the industrial revolution. At least personally I don't know enough to have perspective on cottage production but I imagine daily life must have been quite different 1000 years ago.

Using tech also meant you got an iPad because otherwise teachers and IT would be overwhelmed. That the kids were already much more apt at using such devices was secondary.

In the context of general education I can understand the strategy, it could be a useful learning environment, but certainly not if it is about digital education, tech knowledge or general engineering. Nobody becomes an engineer in a prison, you need to give your users freedom.

An iPad absolutely doesn't make kids "better at technology", if anything it makes them worse because it just wraps everything up in a braindead simple package for consumption.

Ironically, Gen Z was supposed to lead the way as "digital natives", but in many ways they are (speaking broadly) much less technically adapt than, say, Gen Xers, because Gen Xers had to struggle to figure stuff out because it hadn't been all wrapped up with a bow yet, and thus we got to understand the details of how thing worked at a deeper, more fundamental level.

I recall reading some articles about how many Gen Zers new to the workplace didn't even understand how file systems or directories worked, because things like iPads largely hide those details from the end user.

And to emphasize, I'm not dumping on Gen Z - they're, like everyone, just a product of the environment they grew up in. But I strongly disagree that getting access to an iPad makes anyone more technologically adept.

20 year olds are bewildered when they see me opening a computer and replacing stuff instead of bringing it to a shop. "Where did you learn to do that?" It used to be the only way, everybody with a computer did it. The strange thing is that it's still possible but they don't think about it.
Meanwhile today Dutch kids get these extremely large screens at the front of the class to stare at all day for every little thing, the day's schedule, everything. Huge screens, some stretch nearly the entire width of the classroom, with about a third of desks within just three meters of it. All day.
I'm curious about the true logic behind the claim that tablet use lower grades. What is the underlying logic ?

For my own kid, I do limit screen time just because their eyes are still fragile before age 9, not because the above reason.

I asked an AI about the reasoning and the answer comes down to: kids need real-world interaction to support brain development. But if that's the case, aren't these two seperate issues? Using a tablet doesn't damage your brain ... it's just a low-value activity that fails to build the good skills (like video games?) that other activities do. It is not that screens make you dumber, it is that they crowd out the things that make you smarter.

How is handwriting important for cognitive development?
Presumably the combination of concentration, fine motor skills, and language use.
GGP presented it as if there's something unique to handwriting that's important for cognitive development. I have guesses too, but I'd like to know what research etc led to this claim, and if there's more details or nuance.
You're assuming tech will ever be removed.
Kind of why Khan Academy makes me cringe.