Having worked in 1:1 schools and seen phone use / laptop has in the classroom this seems a step in the right direction. Tech is not the answer to everything in education it is just a useful tool that can and should be used from time to time like. Like a calculator but a more versatile.<p>What we have in many classrooms is a tech nightmare where tasks are digitized for just the sake of digitizing and attention span is lost, deep learning and concentration is lost and meaning relationships between student / student or student / instructor are diminished.
As a Swede with toddlers (2 and 3 years old) in preschool I salute this. Preschools are required by law to use tablets in the "education" of toddlers, which is completely insane since more and more research are saying that using screens as a small child might disturb cognitive development.
Call me old school but I think toddlers should play with sticks and balls.<p>Side note: the general view in Sweden is that the school is working terrible and many parents do all they can to teach their young childs to read, write and count because they don't trust the school system to do that for them. I think it's great to teach your kids as much as you can, but it's a bit sad that the reason is this one.
My guess is it's not technology per se that's the problem but that it gets used primarily to make the teacher's life easier and substitute for them giving lessons and feedback.<p>Also, ed-tech built by the lowest bidder is always going to be crap. Imagine "learning" as a kid in the same way that corporate training is done.<p>I think this is the right move, even if it's technically solvable to provide good tech-heavy education, I don't see it as practically possible.
For me, writing on paper provides insights that I just don’t get from a computer.<p>Writing outside the lines, doodles and swirls on the edges as I ruminate. Adding geometric borders around certain areas, arrows pointing at important things. Leaning in to add a tiny side-note…<p>I still always program at work with paper and pen on one side of my keyboard. It’s a bit like a mental clipboard for me. It also gives me another reason to get my eyes off the screen for a bit.
As long as schools allow to store books in their buildings...<p>I keep seeing (in Europe) kids with school bags full of notebooks and books that easily weight 4-5 KG. That's not healthy. The problem I see is that kids have homework that require the books at home, but then teachers use the books at classroom... so, they need to carry them here and there.
I worked in ed-tech for a couple of years.<p>Handwriting is about developing fine motor control which plenty of research have shown is fundamental for developing cognitive skills.<p>There are exceptions but generally technology rarely helps to learn better compared to pen and paper with a good teacher.
Handwriting is one of those things I seem to have an argument with my son (he’s 10). And it isn’t about him having that specific skill. But it’s about having a sense of pride in your work and not half-assing things.<p>But my wife and I struggle to get anyone to agree with us. The teachers don’t seem to care (which my son is happy to relay to me).<p>Other parents say why bother, it’s an outdated skill (I actually disagree, even though my handwriting is often bad from lack of practice, when I do fill up forms by hand, I understand the importance of legibility).<p>But again, to me it is symptomatic of a larger issue where I feel that more and more, kids are not taught to have a sense or standard in the quality of their work and improve upon it, regardless of the particular skill.<p>I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.<p>Am I alone in this? Looking for a good counterpoint.
One advantage of giving kids laptops for schoolwork is that we won't be training a generation that can't touch-type<p>I am a bit serious here though, gone are the days where you were expected to learn computer skills at home. Most people don't use laptops all that much in the same manner millennials used to use desktops. So we are growing in a generation where people prefer to use touchpads instead of mouses and can't touch-type, hampering the productivity of these people unless they train themselves out of it. They have little reason to do so because it is not a 100% difference, more like a 5-30% difference depending on task<p>Funnily enough there is an argument to be made that a lot of millennials and older can't swipe-type in touch devices which is also valid!
I don't wish they'd bring back cursive; I wish they would teach shorthand. If I would have learned shorthand in the 2nd grade, it would have made every single class I took after that better, because I could have taken much better notes.
Interesting. My parents did all my handwriting practice when I was a child so that I could go out and play. Our school graded on exams and labs alone which I aced. My handwriting remained rubbish as I aced my undergraduate program, remained rubbish as I started work in software, and has remained rubbish as I've climbed from success to success.<p>Contra-other-posts, I don't think I would have learned anything of value from handwriting. Perhaps my exam scores would have been higher as some things weren't misunderstood.<p>I also relied on zero notes during lectures, instead finding that close attention lead to near complete recall in class, but I suffered when I tried taking notes as an experiment. My Algebraic Geometry class was a complete disaster.<p>Ideally, if I had to make tradeoffs, my children would be like me: with good alphanumeric and concept recall from memory. I think it is superior to note-taking.
I want my daughter (aged four) to enjoy writing by hand. It's part creative, part practical, but I also think that humans have a connection to the physical act of making things, or marks, that will take a (very) long time to go away, and that we will yearn for if we stop.<p>That said, I love making things, drawing, painting etc, but have terrible handwriting, and mostly hate doing it! My teachers never let me get my "pen licence", so to this day I much prefer a mechanical pencil.
Hasn't it been proved as well that writing things out by hand is the most effective way to memorize things? Wouldn't all schools want to teach this valuable tool to students?
I like the decision, right move judging from what I read about cognitive development in childhood.<p>On a side note, as a highly gifted person, I found it somewhat amusing and tragic how people tend to cast blame on a school system in general and not on individual cognitive difference in their respective children.<p>Talking to parents, 90% believe their kids are above average in intelligence. Well, I have serious doubts. ;)
I can attribute a great deal of poor school results due to books and timed or take-home handwritten assignments.<p>I had a 40lb backpack for school filled with books and notebooks and implements required for class. Forgot a book? Lose a mark.
Random checks on note-taking during class. Forgot your notebook? Lose a mark. Protractor split due to the compression between two books? Lose a mark.<p>I walked to school on many days. My back hurt permanently.<p>I write with my left hand. Nobody knows how to teach this. Letters smear into the next. Ball point pens get jammed. Can’t read your handwriting? Lose a mark. Know exactly what you want to write but cant produce it in time? Lose a mark. Hand is cramped from P.E. from doing 30 pull-ups? Lose a mark. Its a pain to think faster than you can write as you watch the clock run out.<p>When it started being possible to turn in typed assignments or timed tests, life became easier.<p>Don’t do this to kids.
Those digital blackboards are pretty bad.<p>They are laggy and have lower resolution than a chalk board or a whiteboard.<p>And what for? What can they do that a whiteboard cannot?<p>(teachers should write on a board and not use slides, because slides cause teachers to go too fast and to jump over important details.
I actually had hand-writing in school, in Sweden in the late 90s. But since I didn't practice it outside of school, and was such a computer nerd, I can't write good at all now. Whenever I have to sign like 3 copies of a contract, I sign with 3 different signatures.<p>For a while I had a pen pal and that was very good practice, but it was slow, and painful to write a whole letter. I'd have to keep it up daily.
There is a lot of irony in the replies where most people here are in the business of shoving tech into every remaining open space in our lives whilst preaching it should actually not be part of a child's. I myself am a luddite quite honestly but I don't work in tech (directly) so it's odd for me seeing this sentiment so pervasive on a forum for tech workers.
While my own experience and bias would say this is a good thing, because it says "Sweden" I take it (and now my bias) with a grain of salt.<p>Sweden perform quite significantly worse than the rest of the Nordic countries when it comes to school and things such as PISA scores. I do remember seeing in high school (2007 or so) on TV, how Sweden got a bad score and the education minister flat out denied the suggestions by pisa just to push through their political promises
(smaller classes, which I think was mostly a politically motivated, to get teachers support)<p>I think you should probably look to Finland, its much better neighbor, when it comes to school policies.<p>Edit: apparently according to this article[1] the negative trend of declining scores have been reversed since 2016 so who knows, maybe this is a good thing<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thelocal.se/20161206/what-swedens-improving-school-performance-tells-us-pisa" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.thelocal.se/20161206/what-swedens-improving-scho...</a>
> As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research<p>Children. Independent online “research.” Right.
Handwriting is a good skill I suppose.<p>But I think the value is more in writing down your ideas, thought processes, diagrams etc. I don't have a source but I remember reading _something_ about it being a legitimate thing; that it's easier for us to remember and understand something if we've physically had to write it down.
Writing is not moving a pen across paper but learning to wield language. It's been decades since I wrote anything more than a few scribbles using a pen. It's slow. It's clumsy. My hands cramp up. It's literally painful. I don't miss it, at all. Useless skill as far as I'm concerned. I grew up in the seventies and eighties so that was just the way things were done. But that's nearly 40-50 years ago. Doing that right now is backwards.<p>Why teach people how to mess up their hands and wrists and then not teach then how to use a keyboard properly? Most writing that still matters gets done with those. It's faster, more efficient. A lot easier to produce lots of text. Which is actually a key thing when you are learning to write: you need to write a lot. Having tools tell you when you are getting your grammar and spelling wrong is super helpful. Having a teacher with a red pen is slow and inefficient. Fast feedback loops are great for learning. Getting corrected while you are writing is much better than days/weeks later when your poor overworked teacher gets around to dealing with your writing.<p>In the same way, I use a kindle. Actual paper books are a relic of the past. I read more than before I had ebook readers. It's so much better. Why limit yourself to books that fit in the tiny little backpack of a kid when you can the whole world of books and the internet at your finger tips? School books are dreadful. You get locked into whatever the school and published deems successful. Some schools get that right but a lot of them just fall for the mediocre drivel that the education publishers shovel out.<p>Modern schools should embrace technology, AI, and prepare kids for this century; not the last one.
There seems to be a very different way of thinking when the human interface device is a computer vs a pen and paper or a book.<p>I can do some things behind a computer, but some kinds of thinking require me to be away from a computer. Oddly, the shower seems to be a place where I do some of my best thinking.
I think one approach is to complement tech with its analog/mechanical equivalent.<p>Have people play on a real piano but also complement with garage band. Use mechanical type writers alongside Microsoft word.<p>Get kids to understand the origins of many of our digital tools.
I remember a time when "grasping" something was a literal thing.
Strangely enough, however, I only became aware of this when I studied Hegel.
Swedish parent here. I have not seen any effect from this yet. Hopefully there will be some improvements in time for my youngest kid. A new year in school began last month, and for my oldest kids what "acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy" means in practice (and if anything, so far it has been worse this last month than ever before): Each child gets a Chromebook. They get assignments through Google Classroom. Typically the assignments are things like "here are 20 questions; find answers!" and they are more or less on their own Googling and reading Wikipedia to figure things out. I noticed for a few assignments they get lists of recommended reading as well, and sometimes links to youtube videos that are relevant. And links to some awful, ad-riddled, quiz-site, for practice, that at least one of the teachers like to link to.<p>If I understand correctly some of the linked articles and videos are on some paywalled sites containing content specially made for school, so presumably there was some vetting there? When I had a brief look at some articles on subjects I happen to know a bit about I was not particularly impressed though. The printed books they used to have were WAY better.<p>Not that I am sure things are automatically better on paper. I read 99% ebooks and prefer that to books. But what they get now is not anything like the same books, but digitally, unfortunately. And linking to ad-supported sites, in addition to all the Google-dependencies, makes it worse.<p>On the positive side, my oldest son quickly figured out how to install Linux on his Chromebook to run games. I do not think they are allowed to do that, but I am not going to read the fine print to find out.
Good decision. Just like with Covid lockdowns. Somehow when you are away from a screen your mind expands, at least for me. Like the screen craves your attention and robs your thoughts. When I have some kind of problem with coding, I just move away from the computer, get a notebook, start scribbling and writing down things and the solution just comes.
There are numerous studies regarding the brain and dexterity development but they got co-opted by the video game and quick fix industry.<p>If you want to learn how to write with an active mind, you can’t have assists. Pencil is okay with erasing, pen is permanent.<p>Oh well.
> new center-right coalition<p>Holy fascist washing batman! There's no centre party in the Tidö government, it just has conservatives puppeteer by a far right party founded by neo-Nazis...