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A study to prove it
Are you one of those old fossils who thinks it’s terrible that cursive handwriting is increasingly not being taught in primary schools? Do you feel there is a undue emphasis being put on the need to teach coding to children, when the only code they really need is the postal code to put on an envelope? Can I join the club?
There are longstanding arguments in favour of learning cursive writing. Without it, how will our sons and daughters learn to develop indecipherable handwriting and go on to become doctors? And how will they develop flashy signatures, which they are bound to need if they are going to become celebrities?
Well, now we’ve got a little more ammunition to play with. A recent study, reported in Scientific American, found that university students who took lecture notes by hand performed much better on examinations than students who took notes on their laptops. The theory the study authors posit is that a laptop user tends to type notes verbatim, so that the mind is fully occupied by the transcription function; whereas a handwriter employs the mind, out of necessity, to analyze and synthesize while making notes.
So there: cursive writing is home free. Not so fast. Because there are now reports of another study in which handwriting was compared to drawing as a memory aid. A University of Waterloo PhD student and colleagues at the department of psychology observed that people who drew a picture of a simple object, such as an apple—no matter how crude the drawing—remembered it better than those who relied on a cue of the written word alone. The possible reason? Drawing helps combine “visual, motor and semantic information.”
So you can’t drop art from the curriculum either, just to make room for coding, or you’d lose that all important visual, motor and semantic balance. And you certainly can’t drop mathematics, sciences and physical education, which have their own powerful lobbyists. Well, what about English? All that literature stuff is one gigantic waste of precious time, is it not?
Again, not so fast. Scientific American reports on (yet another) study in which the capacity for empathy (generally thought to be a Good Thing) was measured after the completion of reading assignments. Some were given nothing to read, some were given non-fiction and some were given fiction. And the result was that the readers of fiction—literary fiction, mind you, as opposed to entertainment fiction—scored the highest in the empathy department. The working theory is that literary fiction focuses on the psychology of characters and relationships, and requires readers to fill in the blanks themselves, thereby building empathy. (Speaking of empathy, I feel some for Danielle Steel, whose work was used as an example of entertainment fiction. This poor woman has been, up until this study, the world’s bestselling living author. She presumably feels the hurt all the way to the bank. And come think of it, I feel some empathy for her readers, too: both their taste and their empathy quotient have been derided.)
So now, thanks to a study, we have to add English to the list of non-droppable subjects. What’s left? How about cutting history? Out of the question! Case in point: a young relative asked me the other week what it was like to grow up in the horse and buggy era, a query I attributed to ignorance rather than impertinence. So there’s a steep hill to climb, and we can’t afford to make it any steeper. Besides, Stephen Harper is history, and I like the sound of that.
Geography? Not on my watch! Example: one of my son’s friends told me he was invited to go to Austria, but didn’t like the idea of going all the way to the southern Pacific. What does that leave us to cut out—music? Can’t do that; we need it to feel alive again when we have dementia. Wait a second, there’s someone whispering in my ear. Oh, it’s already gone? Scratch that last sentence.
So I have to conclude that there’s no room for coding in the school curriculum, unless we move to a Japanese-style 18-hour-a-day education model and cram it all into our kids. Then again, advocating for technology education is not exactly my strong suit. For instance, there was a diagram in my newspaper the other day purporting to show how a Bitcoin digital currency transaction works. I did not understand the technical terms of Bitcoin itself, like “blockchains,” “nonce,” “miners” and “hash values;” but I also didn’t understand the drawing that was used to simplify the explanation—not a single visual, motor or semantic bit of it.
Show me a little empathy, please. After all, you’ve just been reading fiction. Even if it’s entertainment fiction.
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