Slashdot Mirror
Finland Dumps Handwriting In Favor of Typing
mikejuk writes It seems incredible that in the 21st century schools are still teaching children to scratch marks on paper. Well in Finland they are taking a step in the direction of the future by giving up teaching handwriting. The Savon Sanomat newspaper reports that from autumn 2016 cursive handwriting will no longer be a compulsory part of the school curriculum. Instead the schools will teach keyboard skills and 'texting'. The idea of teaching proper keyboard skills to children is unquestionably a great idea, the idea of texting is a little more dubious and many will mourn the loss of a traditional skill like cursive writing. So what about a world where cursive writing is forgotten? What do you do when your computer is dead and you need to leave a note? The death of cursive script probably isn't the death of handwriting but the death of doing it quickly and with style. Some no doubt will want to master it just for the sake of it — like driving a stick shift. I know some U.S. schools have done the same; how proficient should kids be with cursive?
I don't know about you, but I can jot-down quick notes on scraps of paper a hell of a lot faster than I can get out an electronic device, open a note-taking program, and attempt to use an on-screen keyboard to type the same notes with any degree of accuracy.
I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with several coworkers and an outside vendor, and it was a quite technical meeting. I had to be able to follow all of the jumps between topics and to keep my notes straight and organized. I later reorganized my notes when I typed them for e-mail, but what I took was stream-of-consciousness at best, and would not have been immediately sendable to others. Since I had to reorganize the notes anyway, using paper was a lot more practical than attempting to do it electronically.
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I remember learning cursive all throughout middle school. It never served any functional purpose afterward. Almost nobody used it and the few people who still insisted on it were the ones whose handwriting nobody wanted to have to read because it was so difficult to make out. In college, many professors will not accept a paper written in cursive for that same reason. I still think handwriting is important, but to hell with cursive. Why waste time teaching it when the vast majority will never use it?
I would hope that they're dropping the archaic cursive style of writing because it's just that: archaic. OTOH, ceasing to teach kids how to write in a legible block "font" would be mind-blowingly stupid. No matter what people need to be able to write, but they don't have to write "fancy".
(Not to mention I can't actually manage to *read* most people's cursive writing, no matter what era they were taught it in.)
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I think we're on the same page as this being a bad idea -- but I'm no where near as far along that page as you.
They most likely won't be able to read/write CURSIVE. They'll be able to read JUST fine. They'll be able to WRITE (print little letters that look like the letters they read). Will they be able to write quickly? Probably not, but they'll be able to write just fine.
who needs napkins to do calculations when you have slide rules?
This article could be a complete misconception, based on a translation error. The article says that Finnish children will only be taught "texting". In English, texting usually means writing SMS messages and such. The article refers to a Finnish article, where they talk about "tekstaus". In Finnish, "tekstaus" means writing block letters (or print writing) separate letters by hand. That's different from cursive, where the letters are joined.
According to Wikipedia, in English-speaking countries, children also learn block writing first and MAY learn cursive. It doesn't mention how common it is.
If so, this article is nonsense.
The currently taught Finnish cursive is not very different from "tekstaus" anyhow. I personally nowadays mainly use the older cursive, for the exact reason that it has become rare.
It seems incredible that in the 21st century schools are still teaching children to scratch marks on paper.
It seems incredible? Hello, what sort of bizarro world does this come from? I know that handwriting is becoming less important, but WTF is this? Treating it as some sort of Amazon rainforest tribe barbarity?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Written communication is the only thing that will keep working throughout history and they want to stop teaching it.
They aren't going to stop teaching printing. They are going to stop teaching cursive.
In highschool my cursive was illegible enough that I switched back to printing for notes, assignments, and exams.
I would be with you 100% if if they were going to stop teaching printing, and if all note taking and draft writing, math homehork, spelling tests, and everything else was going to be done on a keyboard. But they aren't doing that. Nobody is suggesting that.
They're getting rid of cursive. It's not a big deal.
You haven't spent much time scribling on napkins. Cursive will tear the napkin and cause it to totally fall apart. You have to stick to print so when it tears it is in an isolated spot. Cursive, the napkin will be weakened continuously where you've written, and once a tear starts it keeps tearing - right through the writing!
As long as the kids are learning to print by hand, they will be fine. Cursive is now a specialized skill for caligraphers.
There is a definite cognitive connection between writing by hand and brain function. For example, I am a better writer when I write by hand. Furthermore, I enjoy the task better because I can to make the cursive squiggles. I use a fountain pen which makes it even more enjoyable. But then I am a luddite. I write letters by hand and put them in the mail. I do it partially because I write prisoners but I also have regular correspondents. It's much better than e-mail.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
The article is appears to be a mix of bad translation provided by google translate and a cultural misunderstanding.
Preface: I'm a Finn. I read OP, was very confused that I never heard about this happening, went to the original article and understood why I never heard about it.
Original article is here: http://www.savonsanomat.fi/uut...
What the article actually says is that teachers will now be allowed to not teach writing in cursive if they choose to do so. They will still be required to teach writing skills, they'll just drop the requirement to teach cursive. Specifically this is a part of update of legal requirements for schools which is a part of larger legislative package that's coming in 2015. Nothing has been decided yet apparently, this is just one of the main suggestions. The change suggested would require complete overhaul of school books, which is not a cheap or easy feat in a country with only 5 million people, meaning far less buyers of said books that pushes up the prices significantly. It would also require massive investments in hardware for poorer students who may not have access to necessary hardware. We are very big on "no child left behind" principle here. That means that some of the poorer regions would have to update their schools. Regions have wide reaching autonomy around here, and can have as few as a few thousand people, so schools for little children tend to be equally small and operate on tight budgets.
Considering that "most teachers are very confused by this requirement" and that teachers in this country are required to have master's degree in education by law and as a result get significant leeway in designing and implementing course work, something that is often considered to be of key importance to Finland's high PISA standings, I don't think we're looking at this change happening on large scale outside a few schools in larger cities any time soon. The article also notes that there are a lot of practical issues with the idea and the article is prefaced with a photograph text under which says that 4th grade student doesn't like this change because "writing in block letters is much slower than in cursive"
Overall this looks like your standard US citizen reading a story about a different country that has a completely different culture and ways of doing things, projecting their own culture upon it, and running away with insanity that results from this heap of misunderstandings. The actual change here is that the schools will likely have teaching of typing skills added to curriculum at much earlier date than before. Not dropping of cursive.
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Man, it's amazing how many people who think they rock at writing, really suck at reading. They're not stopping teaching writing with pen and paper. They are stopping teaching cursive. Printing is faster for note taking anyway, cursive is just a way of trying to make your writing prettier.
So what about a world where cursive writing is forgotten? What do you do when your computer is dead and you need to leave a note?
What do you do? The same thing that I do now, you print it. No reason to put anyone, including myself, through trying to decipher my cursive writing. Idiotic question!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Then blame Timmay for posting a shitty summary that says "giving up teaching handwriting". Notice it does not say "cursive only".
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. The reason to learn and use cursive is because it's much more efficient in terms of writing large amounts. It's not the fault of cursive if people like you can't be bothered to use it correctly any more than it's the fault of the OS that people click on things they shouldn't be clicking on.
I've tried taking notice with regular printing and it just doesn't work out well. I can write far more with cursive before my hand starts to ache.
Before you bring up laptops for taking notes, I'd like to point out that I hate those assholes for making all that noise while I'm trying to concentrate on the class. Not to mention the fact that it's easy to have material wind up on the page that wasn't in the lecture because you're not really thinking about what you're typing.
Historical records in many countries are written in cursive, and not just English wring ones. Only a complete idiot would want to sever children from their past.
They're getting rid of cursive. It's not a big deal.
I disagree. I learned to write cursive in school, and did so in all school assignments except reports until college. My little sister and brother did not have to learn cursive, and even their manuscript is lousy. They write noticeably slower than I (I am left-handed and they are not, their handwriting should be better than mine).
I understand it's not necessary like it used to be, in that formal documents are typed nowadays, but I think it should still be taught. At the least, there should be just as much of an effort into developing a child's handwriting skills, even if it isn't cursive. It is a fine motor skill that is best developed during childhood, and I don't know of any other activity we require children to learn that provides a similar ability.
The same argument goes for teaching long division: it's not that you'll need it per se, but the ability to do it offers benefits beyond merely crunching numbers.
I'll leave it to people to search for themselves, but there's been some interesting studies that show the process of writing by hand involves different aspects of the brain than typing on a computer (there's also differences between a typewriter and PC type keyboard).
There are still writers/authors who write by hand before having their work transcribed, feeling that their creative process is better (or different) when writing manually.
Anyway, it sounds like they're still teaching printing, not cursive yes? So that makes some more sense.
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Finland is also dropping the handwritten long division algorithm in 2016.
Now that's just stupid. People will need to use their smartphone's calculator to figure out everything from restaurant tips to spacing between items to make them look equally spaced to adjusting the ingredients for a recipe.
It seems that the smarter our devices get, the dumber we get.
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Well, seeing as there are people here who can't read (you), what does the writing matter?
I went to primary school in the 60's, ballpoints were not allowed, only fountain pens or pencil. In HS, boys were not allowed to learn typing because "only girls grew up to be typists and secretaries". Nobody had a calculator, even if they did they wouldn't be allowed to use it.
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I seem to be seeing a trend of technology making people dumber, lazier, and more unskilled than ever before, and it really disturbs me.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
A lot of historical documents are written in Olde English or Saxxon.. how far back do we go before we cut the cord on what is 'general' knowledge? Only a complete idiot would expect every child to be able to read Fraktur script in several languages for records that have minimal impact on their day to day lives.
We already have that. So do they.
We older folks sit together and talk to each other. We smile, frown, roll our eyes, laugh, and more, all while undertaking integrated forays into spoken language and listening comprehension.
They sit there mute, heads folded halfway over, tapping madly on their smart-phones while occasionally sniggering to themselves. I've seen whole tables of them doing this, many times. It's like the others at the table don't even exist, except inasmuch as they might be connected via those same smart-phones.
And when you try to engage them in conversation, just watch how long it takes before they're head-back-in-smartphone.
It's a fascinating social development. But I'm not at all certain it is a positive one.
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Finland is also dropping the handwritten long division algorithm in 2016.
Now that's just stupid. People will need to use their smartphone's calculator to figure out everything from restaurant tips to spacing between items to make them look equally spaced to adjusting the ingredients for a recipe.
It seems that the smarter our devices get, the dumber we get.
Say that again when you're using an abacus to do math, in Roman Numerals.
The word "cursive" isn't used much outside North America. "(Hand)writing" (as contrasted with "printing") has much wider currency.
I can't help being reminded of the scene in Wall-E which scrolls past the portraits of the ship's Captains. Their signatures becoming more and more illegible as the machine takes control.
Our family preserves letters, notes, cards and such that document over two hundred years of family history, They remain readable and expressive, exposing age and emotion in ways that print cannot --- in many ways tmore intimately than any photograph.
This Thanksgiving what I saw as a quest at a family dinner was a near total self-absorption in the gadget. The smartphone. the tablet, The need to text as over-powering as the need to drink, no matter how inappropriate the setting or that there was nothing left to say.
Historical records in many countries are written in cursive, and not just English wring ones. Only a complete idiot would want to sever children from their past.
There's a difference between being able to read cursive (i.e. "joined up" in Commonwealth English) handwriting and actually being able to write it yourself. Besides which, even *my* joined-up handwriting isn't the same style as some of the more elaborate "copperplate" styles favoured in the past.
And while we're talking about it, the headline "Finland dumps handwriting"- which the original story used and Slashdot copied- is misleading anyway. From the article itself, it's joined-up writing that's being dumped, not writing altogether. The latter would be far more serious- IMHO kids should learn to write, but joined-up? Well, it makes me slightly uncomfortable to think of ditching it, but then *I* remember how little I actually write these days. (*) As long as they can at least write half-competently, that's the main thing.
FWIW, I certainly think that kids should be being taught basic typing skills, and if you're going to explicitly teach it anyway, it makes sense to go with touch typing. I'd been using computers for around 15 years before I learned to touch type in the late 90s, and that only happened because I explicitly learned to do so. I'd got pretty good at "hunt and peck" (**), but I would never have picked up touch typing skills from that alone.
I used Mavis Beacon, and to be honest, it didn't take *that* long to become good enough that I switched completely to touch-typing. I'm pretty sure that most kids could pick it up as fast, so it shouldn't waste too much schooltime anyway, even if typing (say) became obsolete in fifteen years time.
"Texting" skills, OTOH... stupid waste of time. Smacks of a slightly out-of-touch and conservative middle-aged person having belatedly caught up with this new "texting" fad and mistaking it for an important skill. Even if old-style (numeric keypad) texting needed a bit of practice to learn, it's not something that kids needed to be- or should have been- taught. More importantly, that typing style is being quickly rendered obsolete by the move to smartphones that use virtual QWERTY keyboards instead.
(*) And how rubbish it is often when I do- mainly because the speed of typing has made me impatient with writing speed- even though rushing it doesn't speed things up that much. If I actually make an effort to write, I'm still as neat as I ever was.
(**) My classmates were quite impressed with my typing speed, but this was back in the late 80s/early 90s when computers hadn't permeated everyday life as much, and most domestic use by non-geeks was for games or very basic use that didn't need much typing skill. (I was a geek, of course!)
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How about "cursive is so different from person to person, and most people write it sloppy anyway, so just scribble something that looks vaguely right and they'll just assume you know what you're doing but they just can't read it"?
Things will still be scribbled on the backs of napkins and coasters just now it'll be legible printing instead of unreadable bullcrap.
A lot of historical documents are written in Olde English or Saxxon
Wasn't that a popular diagonally-scrolling shooter in the Early Middle Ages?
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To be clear - they're only dropping the part of long division that is currently performed in cursive.
I've seen some people, that might be considered conspiracy theorists, that believe this is the intent. If it is possible to remove children from foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and Federalist Papers then it would be much easier to convince children to be quiet and obey Dear Leader.
I'm not saying it is a very convincing argument but I've seen it made many times now.
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Guess what getting raised on both metric and cursive is fine, learning wise. I believe you're australian as I seen in "Heartbreak High" TV series hilarious young prick gets in trouble while messing up rolling a carpet floor.. missed by a few inches or tens centimeters because they use inches in a metric country. This crap shortly predated the Mars probe fuck up.
Where do you draw the line? Why not make kids extract roots by hand? Run a few iterations of Newton's Method while they're at it? At some point you're just misusing the limited classroom time you have available. Long division probably crosses that line, and cursive writing indisputably does.
Or difficult enough to require a pretty intense course. In the Netherlands, we have at least a dozen wildly different medieval writing styles, not counting the handwriting of different writers. Given the changes in how to write the letters of the alphabet, grammar drift, and various attempts over the centuries to "modernize" the language and make it "easier to understand", reading old handwriting is nigh impossible without a decent course.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
How do you "sign your name" is the same thing my "luddite" teacher in 9th grade asked when I was the first person in the school to turn in a paper from a word processor. I "printed" my signature and he didn't like it, but he didn't have to.
He, and now you, are the only ones to ever care.
So who is the luddite? Have you ever used a word processor?
Like Sweden did in the 70s, inventing a horrible new handwriting ("SÖ-stilen"); people of that generation can't read the old handwriting, and the new handwriting is really, really ugly. 10 years after forcing that handwriting they let other styles be taught as well, again.
I'm surprised Finland still did cursive handwriting. I'm sure you can add it as extra credit still, and not all schools give it up.
In Mexico City, at the end of the primary school, ~1988, we did learn how to extract square roots (and covered the basis for "higher" roots). Of course, it was not something we used since; in secondary school we went on with algebra, and didn't do much more pure arithmetics since. But square roots are useful to at least estimate without computers.
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It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
At some point you're just misusing the limited classroom time you have available. Long division probably crosses that line
I disagree very strongly. Being able to perform division without the aid of a machine is a critical life skill. I would not allow a child to pass out of elementary school without it.
Yes. Tapestries of that era depict serfs slowly pulling long parchment scrolls bearing the brightly colored playing field diagonally across a refectory table as knights took turns shooting.
I understand it's not necessary like it used to be,... but I think it should still be taught.
I believe that's the same argument for teaching Latin.
Isaac Asimov, "The Feeling of Power", 1958. People have completely forgotten how to do math, and rediscovering how to do it is a military research project.
I can't think of a single time in my life where I would've literally died if I couldn't read.
Yet that happens all the time. People die because they cannot read emergency instructions, a medicine label, a warning label on a pesticide, etc. One thing that all the countries with active ebola have in common, is far lower literacy than neighboring countries where the disease was stopped dead in its tracks.
People that can read have measurably longer, healthier lives. Literacy is a real critical life skill. Manual long division is not. Equating the two is idiotic.
In the xUSSR countries not being able to write cursive is considered a sign of illiteracy. Is English cursive really so horrible? I never learned it formally and I use a bastardized version of cursive and block letters when I need to jot something down quickly. As a result, I can write significantly faster than most native English speakers when they use block letters.
Perhaps the cursive script itself should be revised? Also, cursive writing really helps to develop fine motor skills which are linked with higher cognitive functions. I don't know if there's a causal relationship between two of them, but I won't be surprised.
Wiritng cursive has crossed the line for decades (just teach them so they can write legibly, which is still required - but all that cursive shit, no).
However long division and other things such as doing multiplication by hand are important skills that should still be taught: it internalizes the idea that a big difficult calculation can be made easier by turning it into several smaller calculations. It's a bit like learning asm in computer science - you're (probably) never going to use it in the real world but it's important to know in the understanding of how a computer actually works.
If anything I think schools need to be able to get more people to be able to do mental arithmetic and estimation. If you understand these even if you only ever use a calculator it gives you the skills to sanity check the result (how many times have I thought "that's not right" after entering something into a calculator because it disagreed with a mental estimate, then discovered I had miskeyed a number, especially on a touch screen)
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Being able to perform division without the aid of a machine is a critical life skill.
Why? I can imagine survival situations where you may not have a calculator/cellphone/computer available. But I am having a hard time thinking of any such desperate situation that involves long division. Can you explain a plausible scenario where manual long would be critical to survival?
I wouldn't say that being able to perform long division on paper is, itself, terribly useful; but I'd be a trifle nervous about whether or not learning how to perform calculations manually is related to developing a decent sense for estimation(I don't know if it is or not; but the idea seems just plausible enough that I'd want to have somebody check).
Playing FPU is relatively rarely all that important; but developing a good, reasonably intuitive, sense for approximate answers is immensely helpful. You can always let a computer handle the details; but it's a lot harder to get a computer to tell you that you screwed up somewhere and the result you've arrived at is clearly outside the realm of plausibility.
It is really, really depressing to observe a student dutifully punching numbers into a calculator and then freezing and giving a long look of bovine incomprehension when asked whether their answer makes sense or not. Now, I'm not saying that these skills are, in fact, necessarily linked. People can use a calculator as well as estimate and people can do blind paper-and-pencil right off a cliff. However, I'd want to be suitably careful about anything that might retard the development of a decent sense of what is going on while doing math. If research suggests that there is no problem here, then I'm fine with it. If it suggests that learning manual operations is helpful, even though the manual operations are relatively useless, I'd say that they are well worth it.
I went to primary school late 60's and early 70's and we were allowed only pencil. In HS, we did learn typing on typewriters with inked ribbons because the boys only school I went to believe this skill will be of great use in the future. They were spot on, that was one of the greatest skills I learned there. I learned to type blind with all my fingers and it was a long time between the time I actually learned typing and the time I actually needed it. Something like 4 or 5 years between both events.
Today, I would say cursive writing and typewriting were almost equally useful for me. Needless to say these days I rarely write with a pencil, but it happens often enough to say I am glad I did learn it. Sometimes the computer screen and the keyboard is not the appropriate media to run a brainstorming session. Scribing on a piece of paper, a white or blackboard happens to still be useful and productive.
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