The Death of the Pencil

     There is a feedback loop that has occurred in schools. The culmination of the computer revolution had put the responsibility of helping children learn to use them on schools. The call was answered and now 88% of students’ grade 3 and up are assigned a laptop to complete schoolwork. Curriculum providers brought their programs into the digital space and now students complete much if not most of their schoolwork through digital assignments and online portals.

     What we have gained has value. To function in society is to use computer systems and schools are fulfilling their obligation to ready students in these systems. Screens have filled the classroom and paper and pencil have receded. However, the cost of these transitions from pencil and paper to keyboard and mouse are too great to ignore. We still needed the pencil but the keyboard killed it. The pencil is dead.

     The process of writing by hand has developed alongside our language. The shape of the letters is a function of what our hand is capable of producing.  Language has developed so that thinking and speaking in words is inextricably linked to the physical written word. Before computing and the printing press, words needed to be written down by hand to have permanence. To circumvent that with the keyboard removes a tool for deeper understandings of language and perhaps abstract thought itself.

    We have moved too quickly into this realm and abandoned the physical medium of writing for the keyboard.  The pencil teaches patience, focus, and flow. Writing connects the tactile and the cerebral in a way typing never can. Children need that connection. 

     There are larger implications to the discussion around the classroom and digital education that are economic and political. This is written in the Google era of classroom laptops. Will this ecosystem persist or will it be replaced by Apple or Microsoft? This decision will have huge implications for what our children can and can’t do on a computer and which company wins the jackpot of government contracts.

     This website is built around kids using their computers to learn from web games they play. I hope you continue to enjoy them! Children having access to computers and the internet is a good thing. But we should put digital learning back into a subsection of the education experience instead of the constant companion that it has become. We desperately need to bring back the pencil.

          The solution is a dramatic pull back of digital education. We’re not going to remove the computer from the classroom. The digital transition has its tangible benefits and is to be offset not eliminated. The medium of writing by hand has value beyond its perceived utility in a digital world and the classroom is the only opportunity to preserve it.