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Way back in the 1960's Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called "Forget It," in which he goes over some of the things children used to be routinely taught in school t

Way back in the 1960's Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called "Forget It," in which he goes over some of the things children used to be routinely taught in school that are no longer part of the curriculum. Such as the full range of arithmetic using Roman numerals. Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4 pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom, 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last. Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old information, we should be forgetting more obsolete facts to make room for more modern and efficient material. We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. Nor will we need to. By the time the last generation of cursive readers has died out, people will likely have available a "Google Lens" type augmented-reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma Edith's old love letters.

dylan604 4y ago
>Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old information, we should be forgetting more obsolete facts to make room for more modern and efficient material. In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Instead, I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  Devil's advocate: it's teaching you how to memorize something you don't want yet need to.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I don't want to need it ever
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  The explode function is probably jumbled because the order is different in different languages you've encountered.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Thanks for the gentle let off on the memory problem. Now, how to find similar explanations for all of the other things that can't be remembered ;)
- mlyle 4y ago
  > In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Some schooling focuses way too much on rote, memorization, etc. But........ IMO, we often get the main point of education wrong. It's not so much direct transfer of useful skills or a body of information-- though these are still important. Instead, I think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main goals. On a limited basis, practicing the skill of memorizing poetry and reciting it to a class can be a useful exercise. Now you know you can do that, how to do it, and about how long it's going to take. You were also forced to engage with that particular content in a deeper way than a casual, unmotivated reading by a high school student would have resulted in: the overall cadence and structure is cemented in your head as much as the very words. Education used to be very memorization and recitation heavy. Leaving a little bit in seems useful, even though it was the kind of thing I hated most as a kid.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I agree. I hated the podunk backwoods country town I grew up in, but after 30 years, I have to admit that my schooling was not so bad after all. Actually, it seems to be an outlier in how well it actually prepared me compared to other people's opinion of their schooling. The thing that I appreciate most about the teachers and the curriculums taught was that they taught me (I would say us refering to all students, but don't want to presume) was how to learn. I should say, the math/science classes did this. The history/literature classes were all rote memorization BS. I did not like those classes an did not do well in them. However, the other classes where I learned how to learn allowed me to become what has been labeled "a self-learner". I can read subject material a few times, experiment, and then "know" it well enough to function. Practice and continued use makes for much better retention than rote memorization. I used to ask teachers for anything that was still unclear, now it essentially is replaced with SO searches.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      I noticed an interesting effect in college that other graduates I talked with noticed, too. One learns how to learn. New material is learned faster and more accurately. One also learns what parts to focus on, and what parts can be dismissed, which helps learn more efficiently.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  It's not really the case that memorising those lines have taken up useful brain space. On the contrary from all we know it probably made you better at memorising. Similarly being able to write cursive gives you better fine motor control in your writing hand. I learnt cursive at school, as well as use of a slide rule and log tables. They were obsolete by many decades when I was learning to use them. But are my arithmetic skills worse than the average zoomer who has a smartphone practically cemented into their hand? No, I'm fact I'm probably more efficient at using the calculator app on their phone. In theory computer algebra systems have obsoleted junior maths courses let alone times tables (multiplication tables). But good luck using one if you didn't do the wax-on wax-off leg work of memorising seemingly useless data. In my current job I oversee trainees who have to sit 3 exams (at great cost totalling about 10k). The recommended reading for those those exams is about £25 question bank. Everyone who does it comes away feeling it was useless. The vast majority will pass and tell their more junior friends not to bother with it. And invariably the group that doesn't use it has more fails. There is bias here, those that are willing to work are more motivated and more likely to pass. But this always reminds me that 1) you don't even know what you're gaining when you do any kind of training 2) we rarely remember how we know something or why we came up with a particular idea. Usually the reason is some boring combination of seemingly unrelated grunt work.
  - duifullg 4y ago
    You can make the case than learning almost anything “useless” will help you with something else than everyone considers useful nowadays. Cursive helps with fine motor control. Chess helps you with memorization. Using an abacus might help with both. That’s not the point. The point is kids have a limited time. I don’t want my kids to learn cursive or the abacus because that will take time off from stuff that’s almost surely more relevant. Perhaps I’m wrong and learning with an abacus is the best use of their time. I hated cursive with a passion and some of my teachers forced me to use it at different points of my primary education. It was falling out of fashion then and only the hardcore old-timers thought it should be forced upon children. I wrote a perfectly legible print, but for them I just HAD to do it their way
    - 4y ago
- ch4s3 4y ago
  I would argue that doing that kind of dive into foundational texts in the English literary cannon is more useful than you might expect. Things like the Canterbury Tales were often recited live by someone standing on a table, as you may remember from that lesson. The exercise of memorizing and orally reciting the couplets gives you a totally different intuitive understanding of the material. This also gives you a window through which you can better understand later works, like Shakespeare. Modern literature is also full of allusions and references to these foundational texts, so a passing familiarity gives you access to a deeper reading of newer works. Prior to Chaucer educated people in Europe considered English unsuitable for poetry. His work is part of the story of how English came to be an important global language. That's all to say that going deep on literary classics is valuable in a way that cursive is not.
- michaelgrafl 4y ago
  Human memory doesn't work like that. Nothing gets pushed out when you learn something new. It probably works the other way around even. The more you know (and understand), the easier it gets to remember (and understand) new things.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >Human memory doesn't work like that. Probably right, but that's why we just need to be equiped with an M.2 port so we can upgrade our memory. Or maybe a bit of "better living through chemistry" will come up with a better swapping routine for memory
- bergenty 4y ago
  I used to be against memorization too but to be honest it’s immensely useful and an important skill that takes hard work to accomplish. There’s a special flow to speaking with someone that doesn’t need to stop to look things up on his phone multiple times in a complex conversation.
- ghaff 4y ago
  A nit: Canterbury Tales is Middle English and with the rhythm of the words and the many similarities to modern English, it's not that difficult and it's a good way to appreciate the language. I'd say the same thing about memorizing a Shakespearean soliloquy. Old English/Anglo-Saxon is the language of Beowulf and a modern English speaker would be effectively memorizing a northern European language like German. (It's pre-Norman invasion and therefore pre-Romance language influence.)
  - dylan604 4y ago
    See, other information that can't be recalled! Now that you said, I do kind maybe (memory is fuzzy) something about Middle English. It wasn't until being forced to read Canterbury Tales that I personally realized how Germanic English is. This is probably around the time I learned that Romantic languages had nothing to do with feelings and kisses.
- dsego 4y ago
  In my secondary school we had teachers who dictated their lectures out of their notebooks and we had to write it all down & learn it line by line basically. And then during oral exam recite it back at them. I remember some kids would ask to go from the beginning when they lost track.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Our memory banks are effectively infinite, we can remember a lot of details from very early parts of our lives, all by ourselves or with the help of hypnosis and other techniques. Oftentimes (much more often than we like to think) we do not remember the exact details (see research about witnesses). Lessons on memorization allows children to train their memory.
- hattmall 4y ago
  I feel the case could be made that knowing the explode syntax is obsolete because you should have code hints. That being said, in language the general theme follows English language sentence syntax with the verb abstracted to the function name. As in verb(subject, predicate, preposition) Think of it as a sentence, you would say "Separator exploded the string" The verb is exploded, so that's the function, Seperator would be first, then the string, and any modifiers which would be equivalent to prepositions, as in "Separator exploded the string at the first occurrence". Anyhow that's what used to be taught as best practice if you were developing a new language.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? Building a culture. Not all points are related to the raw utility of doing some task.
- ramblerman 4y ago
  > I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string. On the flip side, having a conversation with someone who *only* memorized those kinds of things would be rather dull.
- reddiky 4y ago
  Me too! It's only been 14 years years for me but I can still make it through most of it, especially given a little help. It is one of the few things I can remember, even compared to poems I might want to memorize to make myself appear "cultured" I wonder why that is? Fear of failure produces a stronger memory response than simple desire?
mlyle 4y ago
> We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. The tricky thing here is while we're transitioning away from some of these things, they still often serve as signals of class and overall quality of education.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  I respect that individual parents would want their schools to teach those things, so that their children will seem high-status. But as a school system, it makes no sense to teach things that only serve as status markers, because if you teach everyone the status marker, it won’t carry any information and people will switch to something else.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > I respect that individual parents would want their schools to teach those things, so that their children will seem high-status. Yup. So the main places that are still teaching cursive: * Wealthier public schools (to keep upper class parents happy, even if it doesn't tie to a state requirement). * Private schools (I teach at one of these). * Various "traditionalist" / "conservative" states.
    - ncpa-cpl 4y ago
      > Yup. So the main places that are still teaching cursive: While cursive is still teached at schools where I live,print letters are the ones used the most I guess there is be a difference between the way public schools and private schools teach handwriting. I can usually figure at by looking at someone’s handwriting whether they went to private or public school.
webmobdev 4y ago
> We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. I don't know about that - writing something out is still the best way to learn and retain something long-term.
- extra88 4y ago
  Okay but you don’t have to handwrite it in cursive.
  - coffee_beqn 4y ago
    Cursive is optimized for fountain pens I believe. As long as we have pencils and ballpoint pens, using cursive is just a holdover from olden times with no actual pros compared to simpler writing methods
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      I use fountain pens in my daily life and don't touch cursive (although my handwriting has some elements of it). It's a misconception that cursive was made for fountain pens. Rather, cursive evolved because it was faster to scrawl words onto paper without lifting up the pen, and the formal version taught in schools was essentially a prescriptivist version of a quick scrawl. It was invented to help you write faster. In particular, I've heard the myth that if you lift a fountain pen up, it might drip on the paper, so it's better to write in one continuous motion. Fountain pens haven't been leaky for the last few hundred years (when well-maintained). By contrast, ballpoints used to leak tons of ink before precision manufacturing and plastics became cheap.
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our need to write is sufficiently limited these days that it's not worth learning another system to speed up writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive until we reach the point where the people who write it have died off. I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore. For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Whoops! Missed '2 pecks to a kenning'! Which is a half-bushel.
- 0xRusty 4y ago
  > Whoops! Missed '2 pecks to a kenning'! Which is a half-bushel. How embarrassing not knowing that
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    It only makes sense, that the entire series is filled out 2:1 the whole way :) Definitely impressed by cooms, quarters and weys!
  - orblivion 4y ago
    Someone's getting the paddle
aaronwalker 4y ago
What do you think is some of the more “modern and efficient material” we should be learning in school now? Things that come to mind: - Keyboard typing - Converting between binary and base 10
- adfm 4y ago
  I suspect we’ll start to see things we wouldn’t expect. Kids are growing up with phones and tablets, so keyboards are debatable, even though they’re commonplace. Consider asking a kid to tell time with an analog clock sometime.
  - ip26 4y ago
    The ability to put down written word is a basic element of literacy. They need to learn some way. Perhaps you are saying they type in on-screen keyboards?
    - irrational 4y ago
      I wonder if voice to text will replace keyboards.
      - dotnet00 4y ago
        People generally think and type much faster than they speak so probably not. Plus, no matter how robust speech to text becomes it still struggles with names and slang.
        wilsonnb3 4y ago
        A quick google search tells me the average typing WPM is 40 and the average speaking WPM is 150
        dotnet00 4y ago
        The average typing WPM isn't comparable to the average typing WPM someone has while working on say, an essay. Just like how the average speaking WPM isn't comparable to the same. Even more when what's being written has to be more proper than spoken language, where grammatical errors, broken sentences or stuttering etc is completely normal and easy to ignore. We've had fairly robust speech to text for a few years now and the only places its seen real penetration in is basic personal assistant stuff involving short and simple queries, so I find it hard to imagine that anyone thinks that speech can replace keyboards as an input method. Even with people I know who've tried to switch to using speech to text due to injuries, it's been a nightmare because there are no easy ways to use it for anything that isn't plain format-less dictionary language. For casual communication it sucks because people use a lot of slang, often even slang exclusive to their friend group, and for serious communication it doesn't work because "delete last word" or "cut sentence X and paste here" is objectively not as convenient/fast for say, the average western highschool student as doing the same via keyboard. Not even considering how unrealistic it is to edit/format text via speech. As a way to reason about this, look at some code (assuming you're a programmer) and try to think of how you would input it without a keyboard.
dpierce9 4y ago
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it. Here is a counterpoint. The US foundational documents (Declaration, Constitution) are written in cursive/script. Public education certainly has something to do with creating citizens capable of participating in US democracy and reading these docs is one significant part of that. Obviously they can be transcribed so I don’t think this is super compelling but perhaps it is not anachronistic as it seems.
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  Can be and has been. So, not compelling at all, I'd say. Even if you extend the general idea to a need to read grandma's recipes, you could post a pic online and someone who can read cursive could transcribe it for you.
  - fuzzzerd 4y ago
    What a horrible way to live. Dependent on others for even basic needs. I'm not arguing you have to be 100% self sufficient, but learning to read what amounts to a specific font shouldn't be too much to ask.
    - lovich 4y ago
      I’d disagree that it’s a basic need or that it’s not too much to ask. I think most people on this board have had to deal with not automating a one off task because the time to automate it is longer than the time saved. Spending time learning how to read a font optimized for hand writing that you might need to read a handful of times in your life seems like it would fall into the same category of work that’s not worth the time
    - ben_w 4y ago
      When I was a pup, my mum had several occult books, including on divination with runes. Because of this, I learned to read them. Because of this, I got slightly more out of the maps (and cover) of The Hobbit than most normal people — Tolkien used runes as merely a font for Dwarfish, which was really just English. I wouldn't say that this is any more useful than cursive.
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
It's way more important for kids to understand how division works and it's place within larger patterns of algebra than to practice doing some specific pen and paper long division algorithm several hundred times per semester.
- deleted 4y ago
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croes 4y ago
>By the time the last generation of cursive readers has died out, people will likely have available a "Google Lens" type augmented-reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma Edith's old love letters. And nobody will recognize the errors Google Lens makes
- irrational 4y ago
  Eh, people can read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I predict there will be people who will learn cursive either as a strange hobby, like calligraphy, or as a sort of ancient language.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
Its already existing for german cursive script. https://readcoop.eu/de/transkribus/suetterlin-uebersetzen/ https://readcoop.eu/de/transkribus/suetterlin-uebersetzen/ Nothing of value was lost. Over-complex communication usually was a attempt to keep others with less time to learn and practice out of the communication stream. Similar to kanji, who a peasant would not learn at scale and couldn't even improvise phonetically to written form.
FerociousTimes 4y ago
> a "Google Lens" type augmented-reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma Edith's old love letters. Actually, your failover system makes me feel anxious inside. What if this proprietary tech gone missing or disappeared completely? What if this proprietary tech gone rogue and just refused to cooperate and render the service for end users for any given reason? I just can't trust one single vendor or corporation with such a critical part of our life but your main point remains salient though.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  this idiotic idea that everything has to be a service and no one can build anything except google will die eventually
  - FerociousTimes 4y ago
    Fingers crossed! We need more decentralization and redundancy in these services lest we see our future turn hostage to corporate financial or political interests.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Sure, but this is what Joe Average already does with Latin.
- 8note 4y ago
  If this goes wrong, what's the impact? I'd expect if a critical part of your life goes wrong, you are likely to die. If this went wrong, you'd either not read the letters, or have fun figuring out how to translate them by hanx
gdilla 4y ago
learning cursive isn't.... rocket science. so i'm sure with a little effort one could get by just fine. Instead of google lens there'll be youtubers teaching you how to do it in 1 video and you'll be fine-ish.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4 pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom, 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last. English customary units for mass, length and volume. I went to American public schools and I was never taught any of these, except I think a single quiz about them in the cooking portion of my home economics class (which was also cut from the curriculum a few years ago.) All the science classes were taught with metric, and no other classes taught units for these things at all. The only customary units I have an intuitive understanding of are pounds, miles, and Fahrenheit. Off the top of my head I can't even tell you how many feet are in a mile, and to me a yard is 'about a meter.' I estimate small distances in meters and multiply by 3 to give other Americans an estimate in feet.
- dv_dt 4y ago
  This gives me hope that someday the US will more fully move to the metric system.
  - Kye 4y ago
    US schools taught metric back when I was in them in the 90s. Then I got out into the world-as-experienced where almost nothing uses it and promptly forgot along with basic French and Spanish and most math, and only retained stuff I personally took interest in. It's not enough to teach things in school without support outside the school.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Virtually all products in America have volumes and weights listed in metric, alongside the customary units. Even those packaged specifically for America. Many beverages specifically are packaged in whole number liters, with oddball fluid ounces listed next to that. e.g. a 1 liter / 33.8 floz bottle of coke. Where customary units seem strongest is in civil/mechanical engineering and adjacent trades, road signs (all in miles), and weather reports in Fahrenheit.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
> Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4 pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom, 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last Good thing the rest of the world uses this amazing system where a kilothing is a thousand of a thing eh.
kemayo 4y ago
My favorite part of that example is that, of course, you'd need five quarters to get to the next unit.
agambrahma 4y ago
Dunno, I feel some form of cursive writing is just a natural human thing to do. I was all for "maximum personal cyborg-ness" at an earlier stage of life, but I now feel the urge to be away from the screen+keyboard for some time, and pen-and-paper is a good fit for that, and ... cursive writing is just a good way of _using_ pen and paper. As long as you are physically embodied, you're going to feel some satisfaction in "doing things with your hands" (i.e. other than typing or pointing). Making marks on a writing medium in a quick, _flowing_ way, using a writing instrument ... is a form of communication, or even a form of expression, that you can do quite well if you try a little bit.
- 8note 4y ago
  For a standard modern pen, printing works well. There's no constraints imposed by the pen about how long your strokes should be, or if the pen will drip.
  - Doxin 4y ago
    For shits and giggles though you should get a cheap fountain pen and try cursive with that again for a bit. Yes printing works best when using a cheap ballpoint, but cursive is much quicker given the correct instrument. Still probably don't teach it in school because who in their right mind is going to bother with the hassle of a fountain pen in this day and age? Typing is wildly faster than either print or cursive for the same amount of practice.
thefz 4y ago
Nah. Roman numerals are fun and a different way to think about how you write a number. It is something I think a lot about and I am glad I have been taught. Same thing for Latin. That thing ruled. That thin rules still

dylan604 4y ago

>Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old information, we should be forgetting more obsolete facts to make room for more modern and efficient material. In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Instead, I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string.

johnchristopher 4y ago
Devil's advocate: it's teaching you how to memorize something you don't want yet need to.
- dylan604 4y ago
  I don't want to need it ever
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
The explode function is probably jumbled because the order is different in different languages you've encountered.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Thanks for the gentle let off on the memory problem. Now, how to find similar explanations for all of the other things that can't be remembered ;)
mlyle 4y ago
> In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Some schooling focuses way too much on rote, memorization, etc. But........ IMO, we often get the main point of education wrong. It's not so much direct transfer of useful skills or a body of information-- though these are still important. Instead, I think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main goals. On a limited basis, practicing the skill of memorizing poetry and reciting it to a class can be a useful exercise. Now you know you can do that, how to do it, and about how long it's going to take. You were also forced to engage with that particular content in a deeper way than a casual, unmotivated reading by a high school student would have resulted in: the overall cadence and structure is cemented in your head as much as the very words. Education used to be very memorization and recitation heavy. Leaving a little bit in seems useful, even though it was the kind of thing I hated most as a kid.
- dylan604 4y ago
  I agree. I hated the podunk backwoods country town I grew up in, but after 30 years, I have to admit that my schooling was not so bad after all. Actually, it seems to be an outlier in how well it actually prepared me compared to other people's opinion of their schooling. The thing that I appreciate most about the teachers and the curriculums taught was that they taught me (I would say us refering to all students, but don't want to presume) was how to learn. I should say, the math/science classes did this. The history/literature classes were all rote memorization BS. I did not like those classes an did not do well in them. However, the other classes where I learned how to learn allowed me to become what has been labeled "a self-learner". I can read subject material a few times, experiment, and then "know" it well enough to function. Practice and continued use makes for much better retention than rote memorization. I used to ask teachers for anything that was still unclear, now it essentially is replaced with SO searches.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I noticed an interesting effect in college that other graduates I talked with noticed, too. One learns how to learn. New material is learned faster and more accurately. One also learns what parts to focus on, and what parts can be dismissed, which helps learn more efficiently.
psychphysic 4y ago
It's not really the case that memorising those lines have taken up useful brain space. On the contrary from all we know it probably made you better at memorising. Similarly being able to write cursive gives you better fine motor control in your writing hand. I learnt cursive at school, as well as use of a slide rule and log tables. They were obsolete by many decades when I was learning to use them. But are my arithmetic skills worse than the average zoomer who has a smartphone practically cemented into their hand? No, I'm fact I'm probably more efficient at using the calculator app on their phone. In theory computer algebra systems have obsoleted junior maths courses let alone times tables (multiplication tables). But good luck using one if you didn't do the wax-on wax-off leg work of memorising seemingly useless data. In my current job I oversee trainees who have to sit 3 exams (at great cost totalling about 10k). The recommended reading for those those exams is about £25 question bank. Everyone who does it comes away feeling it was useless. The vast majority will pass and tell their more junior friends not to bother with it. And invariably the group that doesn't use it has more fails. There is bias here, those that are willing to work are more motivated and more likely to pass. But this always reminds me that 1) you don't even know what you're gaining when you do any kind of training 2) we rarely remember how we know something or why we came up with a particular idea. Usually the reason is some boring combination of seemingly unrelated grunt work.
- duifullg 4y ago
  You can make the case than learning almost anything “useless” will help you with something else than everyone considers useful nowadays. Cursive helps with fine motor control. Chess helps you with memorization. Using an abacus might help with both. That’s not the point. The point is kids have a limited time. I don’t want my kids to learn cursive or the abacus because that will take time off from stuff that’s almost surely more relevant. Perhaps I’m wrong and learning with an abacus is the best use of their time. I hated cursive with a passion and some of my teachers forced me to use it at different points of my primary education. It was falling out of fashion then and only the hardcore old-timers thought it should be forced upon children. I wrote a perfectly legible print, but for them I just HAD to do it their way
  - 4y ago
ch4s3 4y ago
I would argue that doing that kind of dive into foundational texts in the English literary cannon is more useful than you might expect. Things like the Canterbury Tales were often recited live by someone standing on a table, as you may remember from that lesson. The exercise of memorizing and orally reciting the couplets gives you a totally different intuitive understanding of the material. This also gives you a window through which you can better understand later works, like Shakespeare. Modern literature is also full of allusions and references to these foundational texts, so a passing familiarity gives you access to a deeper reading of newer works. Prior to Chaucer educated people in Europe considered English unsuitable for poetry. His work is part of the story of how English came to be an important global language. That's all to say that going deep on literary classics is valuable in a way that cursive is not.
michaelgrafl 4y ago
Human memory doesn't work like that. Nothing gets pushed out when you learn something new. It probably works the other way around even. The more you know (and understand), the easier it gets to remember (and understand) new things.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Human memory doesn't work like that. Probably right, but that's why we just need to be equiped with an M.2 port so we can upgrade our memory. Or maybe a bit of "better living through chemistry" will come up with a better swapping routine for memory
bergenty 4y ago
I used to be against memorization too but to be honest it’s immensely useful and an important skill that takes hard work to accomplish. There’s a special flow to speaking with someone that doesn’t need to stop to look things up on his phone multiple times in a complex conversation.
ghaff 4y ago
A nit: Canterbury Tales is Middle English and with the rhythm of the words and the many similarities to modern English, it's not that difficult and it's a good way to appreciate the language. I'd say the same thing about memorizing a Shakespearean soliloquy. Old English/Anglo-Saxon is the language of Beowulf and a modern English speaker would be effectively memorizing a northern European language like German. (It's pre-Norman invasion and therefore pre-Romance language influence.)
- dylan604 4y ago
  See, other information that can't be recalled! Now that you said, I do kind maybe (memory is fuzzy) something about Middle English. It wasn't until being forced to read Canterbury Tales that I personally realized how Germanic English is. This is probably around the time I learned that Romantic languages had nothing to do with feelings and kisses.
dsego 4y ago
In my secondary school we had teachers who dictated their lectures out of their notebooks and we had to write it all down & learn it line by line basically. And then during oral exam recite it back at them. I remember some kids would ask to go from the beginning when they lost track.
SergeAx 4y ago
Our memory banks are effectively infinite, we can remember a lot of details from very early parts of our lives, all by ourselves or with the help of hypnosis and other techniques. Oftentimes (much more often than we like to think) we do not remember the exact details (see research about witnesses). Lessons on memorization allows children to train their memory.
hattmall 4y ago
I feel the case could be made that knowing the explode syntax is obsolete because you should have code hints. That being said, in language the general theme follows English language sentence syntax with the verb abstracted to the function name. As in verb(subject, predicate, preposition) Think of it as a sentence, you would say "Separator exploded the string" The verb is exploded, so that's the function, Seperator would be first, then the string, and any modifiers which would be equivalent to prepositions, as in "Separator exploded the string at the first occurrence". Anyhow that's what used to be taught as best practice if you were developing a new language.
coldtea 4y ago
>Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? Building a culture. Not all points are related to the raw utility of doing some task.
ramblerman 4y ago
> I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string. On the flip side, having a conversation with someone who *only* memorized those kinds of things would be rather dull.
reddiky 4y ago
Me too! It's only been 14 years years for me but I can still make it through most of it, especially given a little help. It is one of the few things I can remember, even compared to poems I might want to memorize to make myself appear "cultured" I wonder why that is? Fear of failure produces a stronger memory response than simple desire?

mlyle 4y ago

> We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. The tricky thing here is while we're transitioning away from some of these things, they still often serve as signals of class and overall quality of education.

ChadNauseam 4y ago
I respect that individual parents would want their schools to teach those things, so that their children will seem high-status. But as a school system, it makes no sense to teach things that only serve as status markers, because if you teach everyone the status marker, it won’t carry any information and people will switch to something else.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > I respect that individual parents would want their schools to teach those things, so that their children will seem high-status. Yup. So the main places that are still teaching cursive: * Wealthier public schools (to keep upper class parents happy, even if it doesn't tie to a state requirement). * Private schools (I teach at one of these). * Various "traditionalist" / "conservative" states.
  - ncpa-cpl 4y ago
    > Yup. So the main places that are still teaching cursive: While cursive is still teached at schools where I live,print letters are the ones used the most I guess there is be a difference between the way public schools and private schools teach handwriting. I can usually figure at by looking at someone’s handwriting whether they went to private or public school.

webmobdev 4y ago

> We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. I don't know about that - writing something out is still the best way to learn and retain something long-term.

extra88 4y ago
Okay but you don’t have to handwrite it in cursive.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  Cursive is optimized for fountain pens I believe. As long as we have pencils and ballpoint pens, using cursive is just a holdover from olden times with no actual pros compared to simpler writing methods
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I use fountain pens in my daily life and don't touch cursive (although my handwriting has some elements of it). It's a misconception that cursive was made for fountain pens. Rather, cursive evolved because it was faster to scrawl words onto paper without lifting up the pen, and the formal version taught in schools was essentially a prescriptivist version of a quick scrawl. It was invented to help you write faster. In particular, I've heard the myth that if you lift a fountain pen up, it might drip on the paper, so it's better to write in one continuous motion. Fountain pens haven't been leaky for the last few hundred years (when well-maintained). By contrast, ballpoints used to leak tons of ink before precision manufacturing and plastics became cheap.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our need to write is sufficiently limited these days that it's not worth learning another system to speed up writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive until we reach the point where the people who write it have died off. I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore. For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Whoops! Missed '2 pecks to a kenning'! Which is a half-bushel.

0xRusty 4y ago
> Whoops! Missed '2 pecks to a kenning'! Which is a half-bushel. How embarrassing not knowing that
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  It only makes sense, that the entire series is filled out 2:1 the whole way :) Definitely impressed by cooms, quarters and weys!
- orblivion 4y ago
  Someone's getting the paddle

aaronwalker 4y ago

What do you think is some of the more “modern and efficient material” we should be learning in school now? Things that come to mind: - Keyboard typing - Converting between binary and base 10

adfm 4y ago
I suspect we’ll start to see things we wouldn’t expect. Kids are growing up with phones and tablets, so keyboards are debatable, even though they’re commonplace. Consider asking a kid to tell time with an analog clock sometime.
- ip26 4y ago
  The ability to put down written word is a basic element of literacy. They need to learn some way. Perhaps you are saying they type in on-screen keyboards?
  - irrational 4y ago
    I wonder if voice to text will replace keyboards.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      People generally think and type much faster than they speak so probably not. Plus, no matter how robust speech to text becomes it still struggles with names and slang.
      - wilsonnb3 4y ago
        A quick google search tells me the average typing WPM is 40 and the average speaking WPM is 150
        dotnet00 4y ago
        The average typing WPM isn't comparable to the average typing WPM someone has while working on say, an essay. Just like how the average speaking WPM isn't comparable to the same. Even more when what's being written has to be more proper than spoken language, where grammatical errors, broken sentences or stuttering etc is completely normal and easy to ignore. We've had fairly robust speech to text for a few years now and the only places its seen real penetration in is basic personal assistant stuff involving short and simple queries, so I find it hard to imagine that anyone thinks that speech can replace keyboards as an input method. Even with people I know who've tried to switch to using speech to text due to injuries, it's been a nightmare because there are no easy ways to use it for anything that isn't plain format-less dictionary language. For casual communication it sucks because people use a lot of slang, often even slang exclusive to their friend group, and for serious communication it doesn't work because "delete last word" or "cut sentence X and paste here" is objectively not as convenient/fast for say, the average western highschool student as doing the same via keyboard. Not even considering how unrealistic it is to edit/format text via speech. As a way to reason about this, look at some code (assuming you're a programmer) and try to think of how you would input it without a keyboard.

dpierce9 4y ago

My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it. Here is a counterpoint. The US foundational documents (Declaration, Constitution) are written in cursive/script. Public education certainly has something to do with creating citizens capable of participating in US democracy and reading these docs is one significant part of that. Obviously they can be transcribed so I don’t think this is super compelling but perhaps it is not anachronistic as it seems.

cool_dude85 4y ago
Can be and has been. So, not compelling at all, I'd say. Even if you extend the general idea to a need to read grandma's recipes, you could post a pic online and someone who can read cursive could transcribe it for you.
- fuzzzerd 4y ago
  What a horrible way to live. Dependent on others for even basic needs. I'm not arguing you have to be 100% self sufficient, but learning to read what amounts to a specific font shouldn't be too much to ask.
  - lovich 4y ago
    I’d disagree that it’s a basic need or that it’s not too much to ask. I think most people on this board have had to deal with not automating a one off task because the time to automate it is longer than the time saved. Spending time learning how to read a font optimized for hand writing that you might need to read a handful of times in your life seems like it would fall into the same category of work that’s not worth the time
  - ben_w 4y ago
    When I was a pup, my mum had several occult books, including on divination with runes. Because of this, I learned to read them. Because of this, I got slightly more out of the maps (and cover) of The Hobbit than most normal people — Tolkien used runes as merely a font for Dwarfish, which was really just English. I wouldn't say that this is any more useful than cursive.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

It's way more important for kids to understand how division works and it's place within larger patterns of algebra than to practice doing some specific pen and paper long division algorithm several hundred times per semester.

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croes 4y ago

>By the time the last generation of cursive readers has died out, people will likely have available a "Google Lens" type augmented-reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma Edith's old love letters. And nobody will recognize the errors Google Lens makes

irrational 4y ago
Eh, people can read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I predict there will be people who will learn cursive either as a strange hobby, like calligraphy, or as a sort of ancient language.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

Its already existing for german cursive script. https://readcoop.eu/de/transkribus/suetterlin-uebersetzen/ https://readcoop.eu/de/transkribus/suetterlin-uebersetzen/ Nothing of value was lost. Over-complex communication usually was a attempt to keep others with less time to learn and practice out of the communication stream. Similar to kanji, who a peasant would not learn at scale and couldn't even improvise phonetically to written form.

FerociousTimes 4y ago

> a "Google Lens" type augmented-reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma Edith's old love letters. Actually, your failover system makes me feel anxious inside. What if this proprietary tech gone missing or disappeared completely? What if this proprietary tech gone rogue and just refused to cooperate and render the service for end users for any given reason? I just can't trust one single vendor or corporation with such a critical part of our life but your main point remains salient though.

convolvatron 4y ago
this idiotic idea that everything has to be a service and no one can build anything except google will die eventually
- FerociousTimes 4y ago
  Fingers crossed! We need more decentralization and redundancy in these services lest we see our future turn hostage to corporate financial or political interests.
ben_w 4y ago
Sure, but this is what Joe Average already does with Latin.
8note 4y ago
If this goes wrong, what's the impact? I'd expect if a critical part of your life goes wrong, you are likely to die. If this went wrong, you'd either not read the letters, or have fun figuring out how to translate them by hanx

gdilla 4y ago

learning cursive isn't.... rocket science. so i'm sure with a little effort one could get by just fine. Instead of google lens there'll be youtubers teaching you how to do it in 1 video and you'll be fine-ish.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4 pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom, 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last. English customary units for mass, length and volume. I went to American public schools and I was never taught any of these, except I think a single quiz about them in the cooking portion of my home economics class (which was also cut from the curriculum a few years ago.) All the science classes were taught with metric, and no other classes taught units for these things at all. The only customary units I have an intuitive understanding of are pounds, miles, and Fahrenheit. Off the top of my head I can't even tell you how many feet are in a mile, and to me a yard is 'about a meter.' I estimate small distances in meters and multiply by 3 to give other Americans an estimate in feet.

dv_dt 4y ago
This gives me hope that someday the US will more fully move to the metric system.
- Kye 4y ago
  US schools taught metric back when I was in them in the 90s. Then I got out into the world-as-experienced where almost nothing uses it and promptly forgot along with basic French and Spanish and most math, and only retained stuff I personally took interest in. It's not enough to teach things in school without support outside the school.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Virtually all products in America have volumes and weights listed in metric, alongside the customary units. Even those packaged specifically for America. Many beverages specifically are packaged in whole number liters, with oddball fluid ounces listed next to that. e.g. a 1 liter / 33.8 floz bottle of coke. Where customary units seem strongest is in civil/mechanical engineering and adjacent trades, road signs (all in miles), and weather reports in Fahrenheit.

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

> Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4 pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom, 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last Good thing the rest of the world uses this amazing system where a kilothing is a thousand of a thing eh.

kemayo 4y ago

My favorite part of that example is that, of course, you'd need five quarters to get to the next unit.

agambrahma 4y ago

Dunno, I feel some form of cursive writing is just a natural human thing to do. I was all for "maximum personal cyborg-ness" at an earlier stage of life, but I now feel the urge to be away from the screen+keyboard for some time, and pen-and-paper is a good fit for that, and ... cursive writing is just a good way of _using_ pen and paper. As long as you are physically embodied, you're going to feel some satisfaction in "doing things with your hands" (i.e. other than typing or pointing). Making marks on a writing medium in a quick, _flowing_ way, using a writing instrument ... is a form of communication, or even a form of expression, that you can do quite well if you try a little bit.

8note 4y ago
For a standard modern pen, printing works well. There's no constraints imposed by the pen about how long your strokes should be, or if the pen will drip.
- Doxin 4y ago
  For shits and giggles though you should get a cheap fountain pen and try cursive with that again for a bit. Yes printing works best when using a cheap ballpoint, but cursive is much quicker given the correct instrument. Still probably don't teach it in school because who in their right mind is going to bother with the hassle of a fountain pen in this day and age? Typing is wildly faster than either print or cursive for the same amount of practice.

thefz 4y ago

Nah. Roman numerals are fun and a different way to think about how you write a number. It is something I think a lot about and I am glad I have been taught. Same thing for Latin. That thing ruled. That thin rules still