Crypto News: The future of education lies in the past

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Teacher Teacher

As we all know, I failed typing class in high school. Perhaps I was just ahead of my time: A US Department of Education study found that 44% of students who graduated high school in 2000 took a keyboarding course, but just 2.5% of 2019 graduates did. In a 2024 survey of district leaders by Education Week, 19% said their schools had a dedicated touch-typing class.^[1]

Don’t worry kids, we are not headed in this direction:

I think it’s great that technology has replaced the library cards and analog clocks and balancing checkbooks and making change without a cash register during your night shift at Arby’s.^[2] But given the incomprehensible scrawling I produce on those rare occasions I remember to bring my reporter’s notebook to a news event, I am probably not the person to answer this question: Are we pleased that the keyboard replaced penmanship?

Turns out, that’s a trick question.

“A decade and a half after most states stopped requiring cursive in public schools, instruction is making a comeback. More than a dozen states have reintroduced cursive mandates in recent years,” write the Editors. “Decades of research support the benefits of handwriting. Forming letters by hand activates regions of the brain that help children learn to read. Handwriting instruction also has been shown to improve legibility, spelling and fluency, as well as composition quality. The complex connection between the brain and body needed for writing, meanwhile, can sharpen executive-functioning skills.”

The response of the education establishment was pretty much what you’d expect: “Another mandate,” “a waste of time,” “a distraction from the bigger issues we face in public education.” Well, it would certainly cut into TikTok time.

Another thing the establishment doesn’t much like: voucher programs. The American Federation of Teachers recently published a manifesto, “Keep Public Funds for Public Schools: Oppose Vouchers.” It mostly showed that education bureaucrats really like the term “WHEREAS.” Who needs penmanship when you have ALL CAPS?

But here’s a twist: “Whether on purpose or by accident, the Trump administration’s new voucher program could do something it never promised to do: help public schools,” writes Mary Ellen Klas. “Under rules released this month by the US Treasury Department, the program authorizing the first Federal Scholarship Tax Credit allows kids to receive a voucher even if they stay in their public school.” The schools can use the funds “on things like tutoring, after-school programs, transportation and special education services.”

I doubt the money will go to pencils and notepaper. Just not this, please: “Across the United States, school districts and individual educators are experimenting with AI in the classroom,” NPR tells us. “Teachers are using it to develop lesson plans; special educators are using it to track student progress; in some districts, students have access to AI chatbots that give them feedback on their work.”

Yeesh, Abby McCloskey is having enough trouble just using it at home. “The vast majority of parents — 81% — use AI for parenting support. I’m one of them. But as much as I appreciate AI managing my grocery list, I worry it could make parenting harder,” Abby writes. “When I asked Google’s Gemini how AI might go about dismantling American motherhood, its answer rang eerily true: It warned that AI could encourage ‘hyper-individualized isolation,’ intensify perfectionism, and make every parenting decision seem to carry a risk of ‘permanent, catastrophic consequences.’”

When I asked my new pal Muse how AI might go about dismantling American fatherhood, it was right on the nose: “Smart thermostats learn the household’s preferences and quietly override Dad’s sacred 68 degrees. He doesn’t even get the dignity of a confrontation — the house just... disobeys.”

Depressing, although I admit I am tempted by the boring-yet-useful Apple HomeView that Dave Lee recently wrote about.

Where is all this new technology going to get us? For men, probably the same place it got my generation: the parental basement.

“Is ‘Brad,’ the gamer, the new welfare queen?” asks Allison Schrager. “Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently released a video calling for work requirements for those receiving government benefits. To make her point, she featured a young, seemingly able-bodied man at home playing video games. He’s clearly not working — he can’t even be bothered to reach for a potato chip — but he’s collecting benefits.” Here is my old man/cloud moment: Back in my day, we didn’t need a grab stick to reach the cheese balls.

“The ad signifies the emergence of a new political and cultural stereotype, and it’s sparked a backlash from those who feel Brad is being picked on. But it also highlights a serious economic challenge. The proportion of men who are either employed or seeking employment has been in decline for decades,” adds Allison. “This is especially troubling when it comes to young men, who are missing out on the critical skill-building years that are the foundations of future success.”

Skills like, perhaps, cursive?

Yet even the Brads who trade the Xbox for jobs are doing something wrong: They keep them for too long. Huh? “For most of my adult life, ‘job hopping’ has been portrayed in the popular media as: 1) Something that’s happening more and more, especially among young adults. 2) Kind of bad,” writes Justin Fox. Turns out, it’s kind of good: One decades-long study found that early-career job changes were responsible for more than a third of wage growth among American men.

“Meanwhile, the statistics on early-career job switching show that — contrary to popular belief — there’s much less of it going on than there used to be. And that could be a problem,” writes Justin. Anyway, here are some charts he made illustrating a far more nuanced picture of job switching than I can get into here, basically because Justin is better educated than I am.^[3]

Also, I held my first job for 21 years. Think of all the cheese balls I missed out on.

Bonus Education Reading:

Free Universal After-School Is an Easy Win in a World of Problems: Kathryn Anne Edwards
How Ken Griffin’s $3 Billion Could Reshape Higher Education: Gautam Mukunda
The Oregon Governor’s Race Offers a Warning for Democrats: Erika D. Smith

What’s the World Got in Store?

Meta, Tesla, IBM earnings, Oct. 21: Ray-Ban’s Billionaire Family Drama Is Hitting New Lows — Andrea Felsted
U. of Michigan consumer sentiment, Oct. 23: Trump Has Brought Inflation Back to the Heartland — Jonathan Levin
iPhone Duo Goes on sale, Oct 23: Apple’s Year Hinges on the Foldable iPhone — Dave Lee

Girls & Boys

It doesn’t really matter whether Governor Sanders’ “Brad” is a true stereotype or a false one: As her fellow Republican Vice President J.D. Vance said of spurious Haitian dog barbecue rumors, sometimes you have to “create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

Also, it rings true, in a way its female counterpart (Bradlee? Bradleigh?) never would, because girls way outperform boys at every level, right? That’s looking doubtful as well — in the UK and closer to home. Consider the latest Program for International Student Assessment results.

“In PISA’s reading assessment, English girls’ average score declined slightly, while boys improved,” Lara Williams writes. “Female students also experienced a significant drop in math scores and only a partial recovery in science. Boys pulled further ahead in both. The US has seen a similar trend, but it’s not a global pattern.”

“The PISA results aren’t an outlier: In a 2023 study by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, researchers found that a gender gap opened for students in England in year 9,” in math, Lara tells us, “the widest gap seen in any of the 72 participating countries. In previous assessments, girls and boys had performed similarly.”

Don’t worry, the familiar gender gap is firmly in place elsewhere: In Sweden, girls outperformed boys in reading by 41 points and in science by 12 points. Adrian Wooldridge thinks that in the Nordic nation, the kids are alright. “Young people compete to do military service, viewed as a pathway into the elite,” he says, and of course, “parents use public money, in the form of vouchers, to send their children to independent schools.”

Also, as the BBC points out: “Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.”

Note: Please send Ikea meatballs and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.

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[1] Nearly 70% of respondents said their schools taught “keyboarding” in some capacity. Yeah, we know what that means: YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY.

[2] As we know, the one that really saddens me is the disappearance of home economics. I was also terrible at another fading skill, diagramming sentences, which is probably a greater hindrance to my career of choice than my constant use of the backspace key.

[3] Sorry, a running joke, Justin and I went to college together.

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