8 ms·

When swiping supplants scissors: The hidden cost of touchscreens

101 points by SLHamlet 1y ago

Proofread0592 1y ago
> “It’s like they’ve never seen a block,” says Hornbeck, an instructional coach at Beverly City Public Schools in New Jersey, describing how kids fumble when asked to stack just three blocks. “The things they do with the block when you’ve just shown them what to do is boggling.” Whenever I see quotes about "kids these days can't do X", I'm always skeptical. You remember the kids in your class that were just absolutely, indefensibly stupid? These quotes are probably talking about those specific kids. I seriously doubt out of a class of 30 kids, all 30 of them couldn't stack the blocks. It was probably the 5 kids in the class that are just stupid, and every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will.
- ViktorRay 1y ago
  Maybe the proportion of “stupid” kids is increasing due to phone use altering cognitive development? I don’t know if that’s true or not but it is worth thinking about. Especially since apparently Big Tech executives and top engineers are very strict regarding technology use in their children. And very strict regarding screen time. Reminiscent of how tobacco executives would not let their kids smoke while suppressing data regarding lung cancer.
- jakubmazanec 1y ago
  > every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn. And current technology could make this time longer.
  - somat 1y ago
    > Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn. Isn't that the definition of stupid, someone who needs more time than average to learn. While smart would be someone who needs less time than average to learn.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      That seems a little reductive to me, since "needs more time" could mean many different things, ex: 1. (Overall rate) From the same starting-point, this child will always require 2x the time/effort to learn than expected. 2. (Overall offset) This child's thresholds for becoming able to learn many skills at the normal rate tends to be 6 months later than expected. 3. (Specific rates) For a particular task this child learned slowly no matter how old they were. 4. (Specific offsets) For a particular task this child learned slowly, but when stopped trying and revisited it X months later they had no problems. Of those, it sounds like you're assuming the harshest, first version. I'm no child developmental psychologist, but I'd wager that versions 2,3,4 are more frequent than most people would assume, since they take more work to distinguish and the universe tends to be messy.
- dguest 1y ago
  For better or worse they did actually cite statistics: > 77 percent of educators reported young students having greater difficulties handling pencils, pens, and scissors. In comparison, 69 percent noted increased struggles with tying shoes compared to five years ago. But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years. That said, I wouldn't doubt the claim, only the methodology.
  - drdec 1y ago
    > But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years. Oh no, there are for sure more people now who think things are worse vs 5 years ago than there were 5 years ago.
  - crooked-v 1y ago
    I would also have to wonder how much of that is the supposed general 'manual dexterity' problem, and how much is just greater unfamiliarity with those specific items because they're no longer immediately using them every day. I certainly know that my own ability to hand-write for long periods dropped off hard once I got out of high school and shifted into typing almost everything.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Well, there's a huge difference between having 5/30 kids being intensely stupid vs. 6/30 in the average kindergarten. That is catastrophically bad.
everdrive 1y ago
Last 20 years or so seem to be a track record of people coordinating to make voluntarily bad decisions with technology: - social media - chromebooks in school - smartphones - the attention economy - llms - etc None of these were inevitable, and in principle all are reversible. But, we're all trapped by the tyranny of the majority. It feels like it will continue to get worse.
- titzer 1y ago
  It all comes back to growthism. When you're a MegaCorp, you can't make 20% more YoY revenue growth by making better products, charging more, or cutting costs. The only option is to get hundreds of millions or billions of new eyeballs with billions of hours of attention. You gotta keep them off other platforms. You gotta keep them unable to do anything but stare at the screen and consume.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  Chromebooks in school seemed like a great idea before attention economy destroyed society. If your kid is spending their time playing with legos, drawing, etc, and for homework they use the chromebook, which develops rudimentary computer skills and vastly reduces teacher workload, then it's great. Different picture when their past time is tiktok, roblox, etc Inb4 "I grew up gaming all day and I'm fine" millenials: the social fabric of your life didn't depend on the games, they were games. Social media is vastly different. (also you arguably could have done better with better activities)
- Veen 1y ago
  That's what happens when lots of very smart people dedicate their working lives to devising schemes and systems that push people towards making bad decisions. There's a lot of money to be made influencing people to act against their own best interests.
- pempem 1y ago
  Is it the tyranny of the majority? Is the majority really pushing for chromebooks or to get work emails at 9pm or the LLMs which -we breathlessly read every day for 4 years now- will make people jobless? There are certainly conveniences - world changing improvements - but I dont think the majority ever defined or was asked what they were willing to trade. I dont think EULAs and buried opt-outs or binding arbitration across a product portfolio was what they had in mind.
IcyWindows 1y ago
Objectively, how important are those lost skills? I don't disagree that fine motor skills are important, but I don't know for sure if they are still needed like they used to be. Skills needed for daily life change as culture develops.
- goda90 1y ago
  Fine motor skills in a broad sense are building block skills, just like reading(which is also declining). It opens up the opportunity for learning more complex skills. Unless we want to go the route of being 100% automated pampering content consumers like in Wall-E, we should keep up the baseline skills.
- the_snooze 1y ago
  I take a bit of an orthogonal view myself: the skills themselves don't matter nearly as much as the resilience necessary to build them. Consumer tech focuses a lot on low-friction interactions that abstract away challenges. Sometimes those challenges are pointless, but sometimes they're not. If you take away all the challenges everywhere, you end up with someone who's fragile to the tiniest random bumps in life. I think this is true the value of extracurricular activities like sports and art. There's no way to shortcut those skills. The struggle is part of the experience. Every violin player will sound like a dying cat their first year. Every would-be baseball pitcher will make awful throws when playing catch with their dad. But they get better with time, and in the process internalize that they're capable of doing so.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  If you want to just extirpate things like music and art then yeah, it's fine if nobody knows how to use their fingers.
  - jabjq 1y ago
    Those who need fine motor skills can still learn them.
- proteal 1y ago
  It’s kinda like why they make compsci majors take a history class - the actual knowledge may not be particularly useful unto itself, but learning that information/skill tickles a part of the brain you dont normally use. So that later, when you need to use your whole brain to solve some problem, all parts of it are strong. So are the skills themselves important? Not per se, but they represent “meta skills” that we want kids to develop when they are most apt to learn. Ultimately, I think it’s a big TBD - a child’s mind innately wants to learn, it’s just unclear what kids are learning when exposed to so much tech early on and that’s what has teachers worried. I bet the kids will turn out fine, but we as a society won’t really know until the kids are old enough to tell us firsthand.
reedf1 1y ago
Chesterton's Fence always bothered me as an argument unto itself. Without providing (or attempting to a provide) a test for the destruction of the fence along with the argument, you are performing a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. When you do this you are shifting a potentially infinite burden of proof to the other side. It's Chesterton's fence not Chesterton's infinite fucking barrier.
- privatelypublic 1y ago
  Theres a reason it's called chesterson's fence. Not chesterson's law. It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right. I've never seen somebody propose it as a formal debate concept- but rather a perspective in which to enter the debate.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - inanutshellus 1y ago
    > It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right. I think you have that exactly backwards. Meaning... the "prop" would be to assume the fence-builder was right, not wrong, and you need to find the why before you can remove the obviously-dumb-thing-with-visible-no-purpose.
- inanutshellus 1y ago
  I'm sure you're beyond me here, but not quite following. He's not using the argument himself he's saying this is a situation in which people are removing "the fence" (replacing scissor-and-crayon time with tablets) without asking why it was there (establishing fine motor skills). It's clouded here because the article knows why the fence is there. Specifically - the fence (scissors, drawing, coloring) are tools we use in primary school to strengthen the childrens' hands and strengthen their fine motor skills. When they're older and attempting to write a long essay they don't get muscle cramps and break their concentration. Instead, they... simply write. We don't hand-write anymore but we also no longer have the
cjs_ac 1y ago
I was a teacher, in both Australia and the UK. The first thing I was told in an educational psychology lecture was to never cite any research more than ten years old. (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over and over again.) When I was teaching, half of all teachers left the profession within their first five years; I've heard anecdotally that it's 80% now. It's not the clever ones who stay. There's a strong push (often enforced by professional teaching standards) to constantly implement the latest research, which means every teacher has to do the new thing, and is discouraged from thinking about whether it's all bullshit. One of the most enduring ideas in educational psychology is the stage-based theory of Jean Piaget[0]. Computer use belongs very much in 'formal operations', the last stage of the theory, because everything that happens in the computer is just an abstract representation of what happens in the physical world. Progress between stages varies from child to child, but from Piaget's observations, it usually happens around the age of 11, which is when children transition from primary school to secondary school in the Australian and British school systems. This is why children struggle to learn, say, algebra, in primary school. If you introduce these ideas before children are ready for them, they internalise them as social rules in the same way as 'raise your hand before speaking in the classroom'. So not only does introducing computing too early harm the development of other skills, it also teaches a suboptimal approach to computing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  > (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over and over again.) I would suppose if you didn't break the rule the same ideas would be reinvented over and over again, but you wouldn't see it
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  Anecdotally, dunno how much I can get behind this. By 11, I'd learned to touch type and was building virtual houses using one of those consumer CAD programs. My friend was a webmaster and ran a small Pokemon forum. Another friend was producing small musical albums. I'm sure countless SWEs can tell you about their early coding adventures. The real-world experience came first, of course (a whirlwind house hunt that taught me a lot about style and layouts; an intense interest in the series; an early mastery of the piano, respectively). But, "You're too young," would have represented a frustrating impediment to our curiosity and industry. I faced that anyway, later on ("We can't afford that," to multiple attempts at breaking into CGI), but I know at least the latter friend is a prolific musical artist and virtuoso on several instruments. And I imagine quite a lot of software wouldn't exist, or would be/perform much worse, if the people who made it hadn't had early encounters with - in fact, were shaped by - computing.
WillAdams 1y ago
Article on one possible effect of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/well/live/surgeons-hobbies-dexterity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/well/live/surgeons-hobbie... This sort of thing is one argument for why northern European countries still have Sloyd woodworking in schools: https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techniques/sloyd/ https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni... >Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others. Similarly, Maria Montessori's instruction method still seems valid --- interestingly, the blocks were described by one woodworker I knew as quite challenging to make because of the solid/density requirement and the overall size of the largest block. That said, why not extend touchscreens into the real world as was done with early versions of Logo? https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/history.html https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/histor...
- ryoshu 1y ago
  Montessori is great. Highly recommend it. In later years students get access to devices in the one I'm familiar with, but in the early formative years they still use the same old-school materials for learning shapes, objects, quantities, math, etc. They also teach cursive. The head of curriculum talks about how it unlocks different neural pathways. There was recent research that confirmed this.
  - palindome 1y ago
    Went through Montessori growing up. Agree on this.
    - LorenPechtel 1y ago
      3 1/2 years of it myself (all they offered at the time), missed half a year (that half year was very educational but not in the formal sense, I do believe my parents made the right choice), returned to 5th grade at to well above grade level. I have never studied why it was considered superior, only that it was.
rahimnathwani 1y ago
The article mentions tying shoelaces. If you have a kid who hasn't yet learned how to tie their shoelaces, you might find this video helpful: https://youtu.be/JaBmehtalAY https://youtu.be/JaBmehtalAY It shows a method called the 'Ian Knot', which: - results in the same type of knot as the common method, and - is faster because it requires fewer hand movements, and - is as easy to learn as the common method (for kids learning from scratch) When adults encounter it, they usually think it seems hard, but that's just because they're used to the method they've used thousands of times. It's not really harder to learn! BTW I'm pretty sure I learned about the Ian Knot here on HN. It's been posted a bunch of times. The first few times I saw it, I just bookmarked it for later. But when it was time to teach my son, I figured I should use the best method. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Ianknot&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- derblitzmann 1y ago
  Oh yeah, I think learned about the 'Ian knot' on hn as well, though I use the secure variant: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
  - rahimnathwani 1y ago
    I didn't know about this knot, but I'm pretty sure I tried it when I was kid, messing around with different ways to tie laces. I tried it just now, and it's indeed very secure. I almost always wear sneakers, and don't have any problem with laces getting untied, so I'll stick with the Ian Knot. I will suggest this secure knot to my son, though.
- jakubmazanec 1y ago
  Ian Knot is fast, but IMO (well, I preferred it when I was in kindergarten) easiest to learn for a child is Two loop knot. [1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm
  - 1y ago
SLHamlet 1y ago
Schools now giving Chromebooks to Kindergarteners is some crazy unintentional dystopian shit. "They have little badges, like they have their password on them, and they just wave it in front of the Chrome Chromebook [so] they don’t have to memorize all that early on." !!!
- stronglikedan 1y ago
  If you think those kids will ever type a password in their life, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. I'd say what they are being taught is very relevant to their future.
  - pempem 1y ago
    The thing is some of these tools have enduring 100s of years. Multiple generations. Others have changed in just a single generation to be nearly unrecognizable (ipod -> iphone)and their existence can be wiped away by trend/market making/capitalism. Learning how to use a screwdriver helps even when the electric is out, the internet is offline, etc. etc. Learning cursive may not be as immediately helpful but we have all come to accept that developing more neural pathways is important and "smooth brain" is bad
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  What exactly is dystopian about it?
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
extr 1y ago
I'm not saying the thesis here is wrong - it definitely feels directionally correct. But I always wonder with these panics about children's development - do we actually know that developing certain types of skills at certain periods is critical, in the long run? I think about this often with my own kid. He was behind on speech milestones. I looked up outcomes for kids behind on speech milestones. Data shows that early intervention seems to help speech/reading skills into early elementary school. But there was very little data on the longer term outcomes. Does speech therapy when you're 2 or 3 years old really impact your career or lifetime earnings? Seems like it might for kids with true developmental/learning disabilities. But everyone else? As our pediatrician often says "[Outside of severe disability] Nobody goes off to college needing their mommy to sleep, or being unable to use a fork".
- nonameiguess 1y ago
  At least this one is not. I've broken my dominant hand before and then separated the same shoulder, both in the same year, and was surprised to find using scissors to be the single most difficult thing to do with my non-dominant hand, other than writing. It took a few months to get it right, but that's it. Not like it's a lifelong deficiency. You just learn later. Presumably, kids with their inherently more plastic neuromuscular systems learn faster than a 44 year-old, too.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    It's because scissors are actually made for use in one hand or the other. Most are made for right-handed people. If you're left-handed (or forced to use your left hand), get scissors made for left-handed people and they will be easier to use.
- Exoristos 1y ago
  How many industry leaders do you know with speech impediments? And, no, these impediments don't usually vanish over time -- I come from a large family (8 kids), and one of my youngest sisters was allowed to "grow out" of her inability to pronounce 's' and 'r' -- but it never happened, and she required speech therapy at 20. She still struggles. Parents are correct to pay attention to young-childhood milestones.
somat 1y ago
Yeah, but think how great their planer surface manipulation will be later in life. /s
ewgoforth 1y ago
As an anecdote, the summer after I graduated kindergarten I worked very hard to learn to tie my own shoes, because I didn't want to be the only student in first grade who couldn't tie his own shoes. When my kids went into first grade around ten years ago, they couldn't tie their own shoes, but if they had been able to, they would have been about the only kids in their grade who could. Also, very few kids nowadays can whistle compared to when I was a kid. My kids didn't have as much access to screens as a lot of kids do, but they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dmonitor 1y ago
  > they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc. I'm really curious what people mean when they say that. I didn't grow up with smart screens, but I've never felt particularly encumbered by them, and I wouldn't even consider using them a skill. What does the difference between a "bad iPad user" and a "good iPad user" really amount to? Is swiping Tiktok and watching Youtube really something you can become proficient in?
  - ewgoforth 1y ago
    Finding how to change a specific setting on your iPad/iPhone, etc.
  - marcellus23 1y ago
    How is it any different than being proficient with a regular computer? Or any other tool? They're fast at typing, they know where the settings are, they can get around using muscle memory instead of needing to examine every screen to see where things are, etc etc.
    - yoz-y 1y ago
      Regular computers have less handrails and you can hose yourself. Back in the day even a 12 year old needed to at least sometimes poke around autoexec.bat so some understanding as to why things are happening was necessary.
fitsumbelay 1y ago
From the actual Education Week post referenced in the above "Experts say [difficulties using scissors and pencils, and social-emotional capabilities, such as following instructions and sharing] is likely in part a function of the upheaval caused by the pandemic—and that even students who weren’t in grade school during the height of school closures are still experiencing the lingering effects." So the first piece of "evidence" cited actually discusses a whole range of behavioral issues -- not just the inability to use scissors and stack blocks or whatever -- and that these issues were triggered by the pandemic and its continued aftershocks -- not tOo mUcH TOuCHscEEnZ 'n tEchNoLoGee Respect to the medium author's academic credentials and achievements but their post is a classic "first subscribe to my thinly justified POV then buy into my cult I mean product line" sales pitch that can only make correct decent arguments by accidental alignment to convenient data points.
wrp 1y ago
People reason that if a skill is important, people need to become good at it, and becoming good requires starting early in life. This reasoning isn't valid for computer use, and I have an anecdote to illustrate why. When the internet was yet fairly new, I was assigned to teach basic computer use to a class of Saudi Arabian soldiers. Many of these guys were fresh out of the desert, some even still adjusting to the idea of wearing shoes. They had no idea what to do when placed in front of a computer. Imagine if your dog got up on its hind legs, rested its paws on the keyboard, and poked its nose at the screen. To cut the story short, I led them through this and that and by the end of a month, they certainly couldn't touch-type, but they were designing their own web pages. They were so enthusiastic that they were sneaking into the lab after hours (evidently to search online for pics of naked ladies). My point is that computer interfaces are designed to be simple and intuitive, so you don't need an early start to practice like you do with a highly complex task like playing a musical instrument. There is really no developmental benefit to early screen use.
- gspencley 1y ago
  That's an interesting thought experiment. Counter-anecdote: My grandmother has been using computers in some capacity or another since the 1980s. And she is still, by most definitions, completely and utterly "computer illiterate." Her biggest blocker is that she's terrified of making a mistake and breaking something. She would never dare explore a settings menu and tweak things just to find out what is or is not possible. So she calls her relatives to help her with the most basic of task ... and this has been going on for 40-50 years of her life. I wonder if she had been introduced to computers younger in life if that fear of breaking things could have been overcome and replaced by a curiosity and enthusiasm to explore the digital space. I'm also open the possibility that this fear is a personality trait and impacts her in other areas of life as well. We are just trading anecdotes after all ;)
  - aflag 1y ago
    Maybe it's just not as useful to her so she doesn't bother learning?
schiffern 1y ago
Just in case the page is (intentionally) broken for anyone else: https://archive.ph/aHpVv https://archive.ph/aHpVv

101 points by SLHamlet 1y ago

> “It’s like they’ve never seen a block,” says Hornbeck, an instructional coach at Beverly City Public Schools in New Jersey, describing how kids fumble when asked to stack just three blocks. “The things they do with the block when you’ve just shown them what to do is boggling.” Whenever I see quotes about "kids these days can't do X", I'm always skeptical. You remember the kids in your class that were just absolutely, indefensibly stupid? These quotes are probably talking about those specific kids. I seriously doubt out of a class of 30 kids, all 30 of them couldn't stack the blocks. It was probably the 5 kids in the class that are just stupid, and every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will.

ViktorRay 1y ago
Maybe the proportion of “stupid” kids is increasing due to phone use altering cognitive development? I don’t know if that’s true or not but it is worth thinking about. Especially since apparently Big Tech executives and top engineers are very strict regarding technology use in their children. And very strict regarding screen time. Reminiscent of how tobacco executives would not let their kids smoke while suppressing data regarding lung cancer.
jakubmazanec 1y ago
> every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn. And current technology could make this time longer.
- somat 1y ago
  > Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn. Isn't that the definition of stupid, someone who needs more time than average to learn. While smart would be someone who needs less time than average to learn.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    That seems a little reductive to me, since "needs more time" could mean many different things, ex: 1. (Overall rate) From the same starting-point, this child will always require 2x the time/effort to learn than expected. 2. (Overall offset) This child's thresholds for becoming able to learn many skills at the normal rate tends to be 6 months later than expected. 3. (Specific rates) For a particular task this child learned slowly no matter how old they were. 4. (Specific offsets) For a particular task this child learned slowly, but when stopped trying and revisited it X months later they had no problems. Of those, it sounds like you're assuming the harshest, first version. I'm no child developmental psychologist, but I'd wager that versions 2,3,4 are more frequent than most people would assume, since they take more work to distinguish and the universe tends to be messy.
dguest 1y ago
For better or worse they did actually cite statistics: > 77 percent of educators reported young students having greater difficulties handling pencils, pens, and scissors. In comparison, 69 percent noted increased struggles with tying shoes compared to five years ago. But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years. That said, I wouldn't doubt the claim, only the methodology.
- drdec 1y ago
  > But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years. Oh no, there are for sure more people now who think things are worse vs 5 years ago than there were 5 years ago.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  I would also have to wonder how much of that is the supposed general 'manual dexterity' problem, and how much is just greater unfamiliarity with those specific items because they're no longer immediately using them every day. I certainly know that my own ability to hand-write for long periods dropped off hard once I got out of high school and shifted into typing almost everything.
jeffbee 1y ago
Well, there's a huge difference between having 5/30 kids being intensely stupid vs. 6/30 in the average kindergarten. That is catastrophically bad.

everdrive 1y ago

Last 20 years or so seem to be a track record of people coordinating to make voluntarily bad decisions with technology: - social media - chromebooks in school - smartphones - the attention economy - llms - etc None of these were inevitable, and in principle all are reversible. But, we're all trapped by the tyranny of the majority. It feels like it will continue to get worse.

titzer 1y ago
It all comes back to growthism. When you're a MegaCorp, you can't make 20% more YoY revenue growth by making better products, charging more, or cutting costs. The only option is to get hundreds of millions or billions of new eyeballs with billions of hours of attention. You gotta keep them off other platforms. You gotta keep them unable to do anything but stare at the screen and consume.
mvieira38 1y ago
Chromebooks in school seemed like a great idea before attention economy destroyed society. If your kid is spending their time playing with legos, drawing, etc, and for homework they use the chromebook, which develops rudimentary computer skills and vastly reduces teacher workload, then it's great. Different picture when their past time is tiktok, roblox, etc Inb4 "I grew up gaming all day and I'm fine" millenials: the social fabric of your life didn't depend on the games, they were games. Social media is vastly different. (also you arguably could have done better with better activities)
Veen 1y ago
That's what happens when lots of very smart people dedicate their working lives to devising schemes and systems that push people towards making bad decisions. There's a lot of money to be made influencing people to act against their own best interests.
pempem 1y ago
Is it the tyranny of the majority? Is the majority really pushing for chromebooks or to get work emails at 9pm or the LLMs which -we breathlessly read every day for 4 years now- will make people jobless? There are certainly conveniences - world changing improvements - but I dont think the majority ever defined or was asked what they were willing to trade. I dont think EULAs and buried opt-outs or binding arbitration across a product portfolio was what they had in mind.

IcyWindows 1y ago

Objectively, how important are those lost skills? I don't disagree that fine motor skills are important, but I don't know for sure if they are still needed like they used to be. Skills needed for daily life change as culture develops.

goda90 1y ago
Fine motor skills in a broad sense are building block skills, just like reading(which is also declining). It opens up the opportunity for learning more complex skills. Unless we want to go the route of being 100% automated pampering content consumers like in Wall-E, we should keep up the baseline skills.
the_snooze 1y ago
I take a bit of an orthogonal view myself: the skills themselves don't matter nearly as much as the resilience necessary to build them. Consumer tech focuses a lot on low-friction interactions that abstract away challenges. Sometimes those challenges are pointless, but sometimes they're not. If you take away all the challenges everywhere, you end up with someone who's fragile to the tiniest random bumps in life. I think this is true the value of extracurricular activities like sports and art. There's no way to shortcut those skills. The struggle is part of the experience. Every violin player will sound like a dying cat their first year. Every would-be baseball pitcher will make awful throws when playing catch with their dad. But they get better with time, and in the process internalize that they're capable of doing so.
jeffbee 1y ago
If you want to just extirpate things like music and art then yeah, it's fine if nobody knows how to use their fingers.
- jabjq 1y ago
  Those who need fine motor skills can still learn them.
proteal 1y ago
It’s kinda like why they make compsci majors take a history class - the actual knowledge may not be particularly useful unto itself, but learning that information/skill tickles a part of the brain you dont normally use. So that later, when you need to use your whole brain to solve some problem, all parts of it are strong. So are the skills themselves important? Not per se, but they represent “meta skills” that we want kids to develop when they are most apt to learn. Ultimately, I think it’s a big TBD - a child’s mind innately wants to learn, it’s just unclear what kids are learning when exposed to so much tech early on and that’s what has teachers worried. I bet the kids will turn out fine, but we as a society won’t really know until the kids are old enough to tell us firsthand.

reedf1 1y ago

Chesterton's Fence always bothered me as an argument unto itself. Without providing (or attempting to a provide) a test for the destruction of the fence along with the argument, you are performing a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. When you do this you are shifting a potentially infinite burden of proof to the other side. It's Chesterton's fence not Chesterton's infinite fucking barrier.

privatelypublic 1y ago
Theres a reason it's called chesterson's fence. Not chesterson's law. It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right. I've never seen somebody propose it as a formal debate concept- but rather a perspective in which to enter the debate.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- inanutshellus 1y ago
  > It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right. I think you have that exactly backwards. Meaning... the "prop" would be to assume the fence-builder was right, not wrong, and you need to find the why before you can remove the obviously-dumb-thing-with-visible-no-purpose.
inanutshellus 1y ago
I'm sure you're beyond me here, but not quite following. He's not using the argument himself he's saying this is a situation in which people are removing "the fence" (replacing scissor-and-crayon time with tablets) without asking why it was there (establishing fine motor skills). It's clouded here because the article knows why the fence is there. Specifically - the fence (scissors, drawing, coloring) are tools we use in primary school to strengthen the childrens' hands and strengthen their fine motor skills. When they're older and attempting to write a long essay they don't get muscle cramps and break their concentration. Instead, they... simply write. We don't hand-write anymore but we also no longer have the

cjs_ac 1y ago

I was a teacher, in both Australia and the UK. The first thing I was told in an educational psychology lecture was to never cite any research more than ten years old. (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over and over again.) When I was teaching, half of all teachers left the profession within their first five years; I've heard anecdotally that it's 80% now. It's not the clever ones who stay. There's a strong push (often enforced by professional teaching standards) to constantly implement the latest research, which means every teacher has to do the new thing, and is discouraged from thinking about whether it's all bullshit. One of the most enduring ideas in educational psychology is the stage-based theory of Jean Piaget[0]. Computer use belongs very much in 'formal operations', the last stage of the theory, because everything that happens in the computer is just an abstract representation of what happens in the physical world. Progress between stages varies from child to child, but from Piaget's observations, it usually happens around the age of 11, which is when children transition from primary school to secondary school in the Australian and British school systems. This is why children struggle to learn, say, algebra, in primary school. If you introduce these ideas before children are ready for them, they internalise them as social rules in the same way as 'raise your hand before speaking in the classroom'. So not only does introducing computing too early harm the development of other skills, it also teaches a suboptimal approach to computing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...

bryanrasmussen 1y ago
> (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over and over again.) I would suppose if you didn't break the rule the same ideas would be reinvented over and over again, but you wouldn't see it
h2zizzle 1y ago
Anecdotally, dunno how much I can get behind this. By 11, I'd learned to touch type and was building virtual houses using one of those consumer CAD programs. My friend was a webmaster and ran a small Pokemon forum. Another friend was producing small musical albums. I'm sure countless SWEs can tell you about their early coding adventures. The real-world experience came first, of course (a whirlwind house hunt that taught me a lot about style and layouts; an intense interest in the series; an early mastery of the piano, respectively). But, "You're too young," would have represented a frustrating impediment to our curiosity and industry. I faced that anyway, later on ("We can't afford that," to multiple attempts at breaking into CGI), but I know at least the latter friend is a prolific musical artist and virtuoso on several instruments. And I imagine quite a lot of software wouldn't exist, or would be/perform much worse, if the people who made it hadn't had early encounters with - in fact, were shaped by - computing.

WillAdams 1y ago

Article on one possible effect of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/well/live/surgeons-hobbies-dexterity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/well/live/surgeons-hobbie... This sort of thing is one argument for why northern European countries still have Sloyd woodworking in schools: https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techniques/sloyd/ https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni... >Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others. Similarly, Maria Montessori's instruction method still seems valid --- interestingly, the blocks were described by one woodworker I knew as quite challenging to make because of the solid/density requirement and the overall size of the largest block. That said, why not extend touchscreens into the real world as was done with early versions of Logo? https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/history.html https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/histor...

ryoshu 1y ago
Montessori is great. Highly recommend it. In later years students get access to devices in the one I'm familiar with, but in the early formative years they still use the same old-school materials for learning shapes, objects, quantities, math, etc. They also teach cursive. The head of curriculum talks about how it unlocks different neural pathways. There was recent research that confirmed this.
- palindome 1y ago
  Went through Montessori growing up. Agree on this.
  - LorenPechtel 1y ago
    3 1/2 years of it myself (all they offered at the time), missed half a year (that half year was very educational but not in the formal sense, I do believe my parents made the right choice), returned to 5th grade at to well above grade level. I have never studied why it was considered superior, only that it was.

rahimnathwani 1y ago

The article mentions tying shoelaces. If you have a kid who hasn't yet learned how to tie their shoelaces, you might find this video helpful: https://youtu.be/JaBmehtalAY https://youtu.be/JaBmehtalAY It shows a method called the 'Ian Knot', which: - results in the same type of knot as the common method, and - is faster because it requires fewer hand movements, and - is as easy to learn as the common method (for kids learning from scratch) When adults encounter it, they usually think it seems hard, but that's just because they're used to the method they've used thousands of times. It's not really harder to learn! BTW I'm pretty sure I learned about the Ian Knot here on HN. It's been posted a bunch of times. The first few times I saw it, I just bookmarked it for later. But when it was time to teach my son, I figured I should use the best method. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Ianknot&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

derblitzmann 1y ago
Oh yeah, I think learned about the 'Ian knot' on hn as well, though I use the secure variant: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
- rahimnathwani 1y ago
  I didn't know about this knot, but I'm pretty sure I tried it when I was kid, messing around with different ways to tie laces. I tried it just now, and it's indeed very secure. I almost always wear sneakers, and don't have any problem with laces getting untied, so I'll stick with the Ian Knot. I will suggest this secure knot to my son, though.
jakubmazanec 1y ago
Ian Knot is fast, but IMO (well, I preferred it when I was in kindergarten) easiest to learn for a child is Two loop knot. [1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm
- 1y ago

SLHamlet 1y ago

Schools now giving Chromebooks to Kindergarteners is some crazy unintentional dystopian shit. "They have little badges, like they have their password on them, and they just wave it in front of the Chrome Chromebook [so] they don’t have to memorize all that early on." !!!

stronglikedan 1y ago
If you think those kids will ever type a password in their life, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. I'd say what they are being taught is very relevant to their future.
- pempem 1y ago
  The thing is some of these tools have enduring 100s of years. Multiple generations. Others have changed in just a single generation to be nearly unrecognizable (ipod -> iphone)and their existence can be wiped away by trend/market making/capitalism. Learning how to use a screwdriver helps even when the electric is out, the internet is offline, etc. etc. Learning cursive may not be as immediately helpful but we have all come to accept that developing more neural pathways is important and "smooth brain" is bad
Nasrudith 1y ago
What exactly is dystopian about it?
- WillAdams 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

extr 1y ago

I'm not saying the thesis here is wrong - it definitely feels directionally correct. But I always wonder with these panics about children's development - do we actually know that developing certain types of skills at certain periods is critical, in the long run? I think about this often with my own kid. He was behind on speech milestones. I looked up outcomes for kids behind on speech milestones. Data shows that early intervention seems to help speech/reading skills into early elementary school. But there was very little data on the longer term outcomes. Does speech therapy when you're 2 or 3 years old really impact your career or lifetime earnings? Seems like it might for kids with true developmental/learning disabilities. But everyone else? As our pediatrician often says "[Outside of severe disability] Nobody goes off to college needing their mommy to sleep, or being unable to use a fork".

nonameiguess 1y ago
At least this one is not. I've broken my dominant hand before and then separated the same shoulder, both in the same year, and was surprised to find using scissors to be the single most difficult thing to do with my non-dominant hand, other than writing. It took a few months to get it right, but that's it. Not like it's a lifelong deficiency. You just learn later. Presumably, kids with their inherently more plastic neuromuscular systems learn faster than a 44 year-old, too.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  It's because scissors are actually made for use in one hand or the other. Most are made for right-handed people. If you're left-handed (or forced to use your left hand), get scissors made for left-handed people and they will be easier to use.
Exoristos 1y ago
How many industry leaders do you know with speech impediments? And, no, these impediments don't usually vanish over time -- I come from a large family (8 kids), and one of my youngest sisters was allowed to "grow out" of her inability to pronounce 's' and 'r' -- but it never happened, and she required speech therapy at 20. She still struggles. Parents are correct to pay attention to young-childhood milestones.

somat 1y ago

Yeah, but think how great their planer surface manipulation will be later in life. /s

ewgoforth 1y ago

As an anecdote, the summer after I graduated kindergarten I worked very hard to learn to tie my own shoes, because I didn't want to be the only student in first grade who couldn't tie his own shoes. When my kids went into first grade around ten years ago, they couldn't tie their own shoes, but if they had been able to, they would have been about the only kids in their grade who could. Also, very few kids nowadays can whistle compared to when I was a kid. My kids didn't have as much access to screens as a lot of kids do, but they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.

deleted 1y ago
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dmonitor 1y ago
> they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc. I'm really curious what people mean when they say that. I didn't grow up with smart screens, but I've never felt particularly encumbered by them, and I wouldn't even consider using them a skill. What does the difference between a "bad iPad user" and a "good iPad user" really amount to? Is swiping Tiktok and watching Youtube really something you can become proficient in?
- ewgoforth 1y ago
  Finding how to change a specific setting on your iPad/iPhone, etc.
- marcellus23 1y ago
  How is it any different than being proficient with a regular computer? Or any other tool? They're fast at typing, they know where the settings are, they can get around using muscle memory instead of needing to examine every screen to see where things are, etc etc.
  - yoz-y 1y ago
    Regular computers have less handrails and you can hose yourself. Back in the day even a 12 year old needed to at least sometimes poke around autoexec.bat so some understanding as to why things are happening was necessary.

fitsumbelay 1y ago

From the actual Education Week post referenced in the above "Experts say [difficulties using scissors and pencils, and social-emotional capabilities, such as following instructions and sharing] is likely in part a function of the upheaval caused by the pandemic—and that even students who weren’t in grade school during the height of school closures are still experiencing the lingering effects." So the first piece of "evidence" cited actually discusses a whole range of behavioral issues -- not just the inability to use scissors and stack blocks or whatever -- and that these issues were triggered by the pandemic and its continued aftershocks -- not tOo mUcH TOuCHscEEnZ 'n tEchNoLoGee Respect to the medium author's academic credentials and achievements but their post is a classic "first subscribe to my thinly justified POV then buy into my cult I mean product line" sales pitch that can only make correct decent arguments by accidental alignment to convenient data points.

wrp 1y ago

People reason that if a skill is important, people need to become good at it, and becoming good requires starting early in life. This reasoning isn't valid for computer use, and I have an anecdote to illustrate why. When the internet was yet fairly new, I was assigned to teach basic computer use to a class of Saudi Arabian soldiers. Many of these guys were fresh out of the desert, some even still adjusting to the idea of wearing shoes. They had no idea what to do when placed in front of a computer. Imagine if your dog got up on its hind legs, rested its paws on the keyboard, and poked its nose at the screen. To cut the story short, I led them through this and that and by the end of a month, they certainly couldn't touch-type, but they were designing their own web pages. They were so enthusiastic that they were sneaking into the lab after hours (evidently to search online for pics of naked ladies). My point is that computer interfaces are designed to be simple and intuitive, so you don't need an early start to practice like you do with a highly complex task like playing a musical instrument. There is really no developmental benefit to early screen use.

gspencley 1y ago
That's an interesting thought experiment. Counter-anecdote: My grandmother has been using computers in some capacity or another since the 1980s. And she is still, by most definitions, completely and utterly "computer illiterate." Her biggest blocker is that she's terrified of making a mistake and breaking something. She would never dare explore a settings menu and tweak things just to find out what is or is not possible. So she calls her relatives to help her with the most basic of task ... and this has been going on for 40-50 years of her life. I wonder if she had been introduced to computers younger in life if that fear of breaking things could have been overcome and replaced by a curiosity and enthusiasm to explore the digital space. I'm also open the possibility that this fear is a personality trait and impacts her in other areas of life as well. We are just trading anecdotes after all ;)
- aflag 1y ago
  Maybe it's just not as useful to her so she doesn't bother learning?

schiffern 1y ago

Just in case the page is (intentionally) broken for anyone else: https://archive.ph/aHpVv https://archive.ph/aHpVv