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The Case For Mandatory Touch-Typing In High School
Hugh Pickens writes "With the perspective of forty-plus years since my graduation, I would say the single most useful course I took in high school was a business class in touch-typing that gave me a head start for writing and with computers that I have benefited from my entire life. So it was with particular interest that I read Gordon Rayner's essay in the Telegraph proposing that schools add a mandatory course in touch typing to the cornerstones of education: reading, writing and arithmetic. 'Regardless of the career a child takes up when they leave school, a high percentage of them will use a keyboard in their daily work, and all of them are likely to use a keyboard in their leisure time,' writes Rayner. 'Touch-typing would help every child throughout their lives — so why are our schools so blind to this?'"
I'm a software engineer who can't touch type. And I can honestly say that learning wouldn't increase my productivity in any measurable way. I don't spend a majority of my day typing. For every minute spent typing I spend at least 15 thinking, debugging, etc.
Maybe you suck at software engineering. That's a possibility.
There are those of us whose code is pristine and perfect the moment if flows from our brain cells down to our fingers and into the computer. Thinking takes 15 times longer than doing? I hope someone else makes the decision where and what you eat for lunch everyday. Debugging? Maybe you need to spend a little more time thinking if your code still has bugs when you finally type it in to the computer.