I don't think that would make me unhappy. Although I can think of settings where writing is necessary, but where a keyboard would be distracting to others. For example, I don't like it when somebody's taking notes on a laptop during a meeting, because sometimes they seem more interested in their computer than the meeting. For some reason, calculators don't irritate me in the same way.

As far as what's good for the kid, I believe fairly strongly that each one should be encouraged to use whatever method of recording the words is easiest for him, whether that happens to be longhand, typing, or engraving the words into granite with a hammer and chisel.

I base this opinion on my own experience as a kid. Longhand was difficult and laborious for me, and I was encouraged by my teachers to worry way too much about good penmanship. As a result, I largely missed that the gist of writing is really the purely mental process of organizing thoughts into coherent sentences and paragraphs. As it happened, I learned touch typing when I was twelve or thirteen. Almost overnight I became a better writer, simply because I was no longer constrained by the tedious, mechanical chore of actually writing the words on the paper.

I read a related article just a few days ago. Somebody had done a study that showed that kids who used cursive handwriting were better writers than those who printed everything using block letters. Their conclusion was that cursive handwriting was the greatest thing since frequent tire rotation, and that computers are evil because they have contributed its decline.

I agree with the study's results that cursive handwriters are probably better writers than block printers, simply becasue cursive handwriting is generally less tedious than block printing. But I don't think the conclusion about computers is valid. They should have repeated the study to compare cursive handwriters with keyboardists and then drawn their conclusions. I suspect that they'd find that typists are generally better writers than those who write by hand, and that hence, computers are just swell.

But as I said before, for each individual kid, you should throw all the studies and generalizations out the window and let him use whatever method he finds easiest. The important thing is the words themselves, not how they got onto the paper.

-- Russ