Episode 156: If writing is getting outdated, will the same happen to typing?

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School Podcast.

Speaker 4:

Welcome to the School of School Podcast.

Andy Psarianos

Welcome back to another exciting episode of a top-rated podcast, the School of School Podcast. I'm here with the two most important people on the podcast, Adam and Robin.

Robin Potter

Hello.

Adam Gifford

How you doing, Andy?

Robin Potter

Andy, we'll include you too. I think there's three people.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. I'm doing great. No, I'm just a facilitator. Anyway, I was talking to someone the other day, it's actually a relative, and she said something really interesting to me. And I think we maybe even have talked about this a little bit before, but it really resonated with me and it got me down this whole path. She said, "Whenever grandma sends my kids a card," I think Christmas, birthday, whatever, "they can't read it and I have to read it to them." Now her kids are not kids, her kids are in their 20's. She writes in cursive.

Now it dawned on me, well, should we be teaching them how to read cursive? Because there's still a lot of people who write that way, and there's still certainly a lot of stuff that was written that way that has some significant importance. Now we have this whole generation of people who are illiterate to this way of writing. They can't write it or read it.

Robin Potter

We can write in code, and the kids can't even read it. Just write in cursive, there you go.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. Well, there you go. But, well, how much should we be even thinking about this? Do we pay effort to this? But what about the future? Because then on the flip side, she said, But my son said to me, "Yeah, well, I don't need to learn how to type," because on a different conversation, he didn't type. "Because in a couple of years, we're just going to talk to machines. We're never going to have to write stuff." Okay, well, that's interesting. That's quite a progression from not being able to read cursive. So I guess the question is how much of this past stuff is actually should we be teaching it and should we be preparing them better for the future or whatever? So that's the question. It's really a curriculum question.

Adam Gifford

Well, I think this is really interesting. I think it's really interesting. So listen, if it's important, there's a quick fix. It's not like we all need to rush out and learn to write in beautiful cursive. My grandparents had gorgeous writing, absolutely gorgeous, but they passed away quite some time ago, so that's not replicated. So I'm sure that there's fonts that we can use, and if we needed them to understand that, then we can just print some pages out with cursive and we can go through that and they'll be familiar with the format of what they're writing. I think what this leans into for me, because I think about say my schooling and think how relevant would that be today if I was to think about schooling in New Zealand? And there were a lot of deficits, a lot of deficits with the actual content of what we talked about.

So I think it then becomes, is it the content itself or the competencies in which we learn the content through? Which is the most important? And I think that, I don't know, there's probably another test that we can put into it that if we've been writing for thousands of years now, the likelihood is that there'll be some form of writing going forward. We know that whether it's dictated or whatever, the function of writing still exists. So I just wonder if we reframe it slightly and think what are the competencies that we can learn through that and acquire the skills that is effectively decoding symbols that are given to us, which is really important. And I can't think of a subject where that's not the case. Where there is some decoding, think mathematics, think the abstract of mathematics. We read mathematics. So it still feeds into that same idea that an idea can be shared.

Robin Potter

You've sparked something for me, Adam, because Andy started by talking about cursive, and then I get into other aspects of what we've learned in school before, and I was thinking about languages. So there will probably come a point in time where we don't have to learn languages because, and we've touched on these subjects before in other podcasts, but what makes me think is parts of the brain need to be worked. And I don't think if we move everything into the future with technology where, well, we don't need to learn those things because AI can do it for us. Will we be able to get to those places in our brain that will help us as individuals to grow and to learn if we're just relying on AI in the future?

Or even thinking cursive is like small motor skills, they say, for your fingers and your hands. And language, obviously, is another part of your brain that you may not be using if you don't attempt to learn a new language. Sure, we can give everything to AI and we can learn nothing or we can all be competent because we have technology. But what about those things that are really important for us to be learning all the time to exercise our brains and grow?

Andy Psarianos

But the thing though is it is challenging. So it depends on which way you want to look at it. If you look at industry, for example. Most people have to get jobs at some point and they have to work in the job market. If you look at the trajectory that you've been through, and it may have not been as extreme as other people, but some people have just learned a whole bunch of stuff in their career that has become irrelevant. In my particular case, that's really true. I mean, when I got into working out of college, I worked in the graphic arts and everything was photography based. And my first job was primarily spent in dealing with photographic materials all day long. People would send me stuff that was photographic and I would work all day and I would end up giving somebody else something that was photographic.

So that meant that I needed to understand the physics behind the photographic process, and in my particular case, colour separation. I needed to understand light and colour separation and filters and all this kind of stuff. And then I needed to know all the chemistry involved in the dark room. I needed to understand the chemical process in the dark room, all this stuff. None of it, zero, none of it has any practical value anymore. It took me, I spent five years doing an apprenticeship in a trade that no longer exists. And then from there, I ended up working in it for over a decade. All that information was gone. And then when it got computerised, I had to learn all this computer stuff. Started off with things like operating systems, like DOS and then other things. DOS? What the hell is DOS? Nobody even knows what it is anymore. And all these things and all this information was just throwaway information. So this is a real thing nowadays. So should schools be teaching those things-

Adam Gifford

I want to challenge you on that. I don't accept, even though it's yours, Andy, I don't accept it. And I'll tell you why. You two both know this. I do a jewellery class in an evening, and I was talking to someone there and they were talking about doing something with ceramics. And they said, "I realised the other night the importance of process." So even understanding, I guarantee you the processes that you would've used whilst you might not be using them now, understanding that if you get processes wrong, things become inefficient. That before you even start to do something, you need to understand these are the sorts of things. I guarantee you there would've been stuff that you were looking at that you would've had an idea about pictures that would've worked well or worked not so well. Colour separation, these sorts of things. Now we are in the textbook game, that comes into it massively I'm sure that your eye that you would've developed through that to see whether or not development worked.

So I would argue that there's a whole bunch of competencies that you learn there. Now, you're no longer literally getting your hands wet with the process of developing, but I would argue that when you first started, those processes wouldn't have been good. I guarantee you there would've been some stuff that the efficiencies wouldn't have taken place as well. And so if you were to go into a project now, there'd be competencies that would work there. Now, I know there might've been other ways to learn those processes, but I still think that those things serve you.

Andy Psarianos

No, but what you're saying, I think the answer lies, I think you and Robin both touched on the answer here, which is that you don't want to fixate on the thing. Whatever it is, it's the process. It's the larger picture that's important. And it's always the case when you teach. It's like there's conventions come and go, there's technology comes and goes, and at the heart, you see, I think one of the issues that we have to try to overcome still with schooling is that schooling was, to a certain extent anyway, was always developed to prepare people for industry. But it was done at a time when industry didn't change very quickly. But now industry is perpetually changing. In our lifetimes, nevermind the children that we're responsible for teaching, but in our lifetimes it changed so much. That's just accelerating all the time. So the question goes back, how do you decide what are the things that you teach?

Like cursive handwriting, I think a lot of people would accept now that that's probably not something that we should spend a lot of time in the curriculum. Other things, some are debatable, Roman numerals. I mean, there's a benefit in knowing Roman numerals, especially if you live in the old world because you can read a clock. But nobody reads a clock by looking at the numbers. They look at where the position of the hands are. A clock with no numbers works just as well once you understand the principle of a clock. So I get what are Roman numerals good for? I don't know. You'll find them in a copyright page of really old books or you'll find them on gravestones. Other than that, you don't really run into Roman numerals very much. Why spend so much time teaching Roman numerals?

Robin Potter

Yeah. Again-

Adam Gifford

The point's a good one though.

Robin Potter

We're bringing up the same points. That's it. We don't have to necessarily teach those particular subjects, but perhaps we need to still be aware that there are competencies and skills that can be incorporated from those past courses that would be valuable as we move forward with technology.

Andy Psarianos

That's right. And competencies is the key word. You got to teach to competencies. You mustn't teach to content. The content's not really all that important really, because you can always find out. You can always find out. There's always a way to find out.

Adam Gifford

I think that's a massive shift too. I think when I was first trained and we taught children to do stuff, and it was around task completion. So it was like get the children to add fractions and you get them to add fractions and at the end of it, you are successful when they can add fractions. But if someone had said, "Is there a metacognitive element to that? Did you give them an opportunity to learn for themselves and develop that?" I wouldn't have a clue what they were talking about. "Did you give them a chance to visualise that? Did you generalise or find patterns and those sorts of things?" Well, yeah, by chance, I might've got lucky with a question that I asked and said, "Oh, did you notice this about this?" But in terms of a conscious, this is something that I'm developing, no, that's a chance thing.

And some teachers may have got that more right than others, but it didn't seem to be part of learning to be a teacher. You might've got a wee hint at some things like let the children learn for themselves and those sorts of things. But as a competency that we can actually categorise and do something about and be mindful about when we don't give children a chance to do that, in my experience, that's a reasonably new phenomenon and something that, I know we've talked about this before, but something that say the international studies, the conversation starting to broaden out now and to talk about when they're writing questions, these are the competencies that we might be looking at as opposed to can a child add fractions full stop? And that's all we are bothered about. And I think that is a shift. I think that it really is a shift.

Andy Psarianos

I think it's really profound what you guys are onto here. So if you break it down to, okay, what are the things that we try to teach people through their schooling? Some of it is just call it content and some content you need to learn. You just need to learn it. It's just you're dysfunctional if you don't know it, like the alphabet. You need to know the alphabet. You need to know the alphabet. And you know what? You need to know the order of the alphabet. Is there any particular scientific, well-proven reason why the letter C comes before the letter D? No, there isn't. Just remember that that's how it goes. We've all agreed. Don't reorder it for the sake of it. It's not helpful. So there's just stuff just you need to know this.

Okay, then there's stuff that's more related to call it intellectual competence. Are you able to think in a systematic, clear way to maybe solve a problem or to decipher text? Are you able to, and we're not just talking about from a scientific point of view, can you read a poem and get a sense of it? That's intellectual competence. You're trying to get into somebody else's mind. You're trying to make sense of emotions or whatever it is. So those kinds of things we need to teach people so that they're capable of doing that. And that's where the competencies come into play. But there's this other thing which are, we'll call them skills. And the skills are the things that we need to question really. Like a skill like this is how you do long division, for example. Or this is how you write cursively. These things are skills.

They're questionable most of the time. How much importance we should put on skills because the skills will change. They're going to go, boom, cursive writing, gone, long division. Do you know anybody outside of primary school who does long division? Maybe your parents. When was the last time you said, "Oh, 236 divided by 14?" No, you get your phone out and you go 16 divided by 14. Unless you're some kind of human calculator, that's what you're going to do. Nobody is going to do that. So I think the skills are the ones we're questioning.

Robin Potter

And both of you have brought up for me though, wondering what these skills are. And the one thing I keep thinking of is because again, we're talking about technology and moving forward that, and Adam, you had mentioned something about getting students to explain something. And I thought, I wonder if that's going to become more and more important where we're having the students, A, speak, talk in front of the class and give an explanation of the learning. Because I see us as becoming more or less and less able to do that. We're becoming so focused on phones and everything digital. And do you think that just conversation and explaining these concepts to others will be important or something that's just also going to go away?

Adam Gifford

I think one of the things that I think is really important, and I remember listening to the head of recruitment for BT, this must be a good 15 years ago, possibly more. And they said they used to walk into Oxford and Cambridge and take the children that did the top of the exams and they could get them and recruit them and they would be at the forefront of communications. And they said about 15, 20 years ago, everything changed with the internet and it's all projects based. And this is going back a long way. So now we fast forward to today, we often work remotely. We have these windows of being able to share common ideas. So let's get together on this project and we have this window of being able to get these ideas understood and put through to completion whilst working by ourselves. And I think that that's a very different skill because everyone's going to have different knowledge. We've got knowledge at our fingertips.

But working collaboratively across a whole different group of people, time zones, with these snippets of being able to get information across, I think that's a skill in itself. But I think that collaborative working, that's always been part of an approach in schools that I think is really important. We didn't do a lot of it when we were at school. We just were given the page numbers of the book or whatever it is, and we just got on with it. And if we had a problem, we asked the teacher. But I don't remember doing collaborative work or that type of thing. I mean, that's a really general thing for me to say, but I just think that, well, within our company, we work across time zones, different people. We have windows to get clarity on stuff, things like that. We're not unique. That's happening globally, isn't it?

And so does that require a different skillset? I suggest it does because when I was a kid and going to school in New Zealand, people just simply didn't work like that. They just didn't. And if they were going to work across time zones, they'd get in a plane and they'd go and be in that time zone. So you're not working across it. You literally had to go into it, otherwise it didn't exist. So there must be differences. There has to be.

Andy Psarianos

Robin, to go back to your point, communication is a core competency that leads to being able to work, to be functional. To be intellectually competent, you have to be able to communicate. Otherwise, you're no good to society and society is no good to you if you're incapable of communicating. It doesn't matter how smart you are. You could be the smartest person in the world. You could be that person who could divide 236 by 14 in their head, but you're of no use to society if you can't tell anybody what the answer is or how you worked it out, or nobody can ask you a question that you can answer. So that communication is a core competency. It's a key part of being a functional person in society. And I think that that's the key. We've got to know that the goal is being functional members of society, and we need to know that we need to teach people certain conventions and facts because they just need to know them.

You're not functional if you can't do these things. Green means go. Red means stop. Everybody needs to agree. There's no good if one person that means that red is go and green is stop. It just creates chaos. It's just conventions. There's no logic behind it. We just agree it. And then there's the core competencies. And the core competencies have got to lead towards stuff like intellectual competence. And the skills, questionable. In college, I learned how to agitate a tray of developer that's a metre by one and a half metres. Giant tray, just imagine a tray on your table with a piece of film in it that's a metre by metre and a half. It's a real skill to agitate the tray so that the developer circulates around the entire film so the entire film develops at a consistent rate. So that one side of it doesn't develop faster than the other. What use is that skill now? None. Nothing. I could do it better than anybody else, could practise that for hours, walking around this tray, lifting the corners in a particular fashion, counting in my head.

Robin Potter

Balance.

Andy Psarianos

In the dark too, in the complete dark, we're talking about here. Not even a red light, dark room. I'm talking about black dark room.

Robin Potter

I'm sure you can apply that to something else for sure.

Andy Psarianos

Dance.

Robin Potter

Dance, balance. All right, we'll see you next time.

Speaker 4:

Thank you for joining us on the School of School Podcast.