The craft of writing, including by hand, is making a welcome comeback. Photo: AERO.
It’s being called a 30-year policy failure. The teaching of writing has been described as an orphan subject but like its cousins, reading and ‘rithmetic, it’s back in vogue.
New resources from the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) are being rolled out across the nation’s schools after an analysis of a decade’s worth of NAPLAN data revealed that the majority of Australian Year 9 students wrote at a Year 4 level.
This renewed focus on writing will also be taught across other subjects because, surprise, such a foundational skill helps students do better in maths and science.
AERO CEO Jenny Donovan told the ABC a large number of students’ knowledge of punctuation and sentence structure was at a Year 4 level, “so [it was] serious cause for concern because writing was such an important skill”.
AERO trialled the resources last year in 10 schools across three different states, with a marked increase in results.
Teach children how to write and they actually learn to do it. Genius.
The bigger question is how did educationalists perpetrate such an evidence-free con on education departments, teachers, families and students, swapping the rudiments of writing for “creativity” and “agency”, rendering a generation of kids virtually illiterate in an increasingly complex world.
There is nothing freeing or creative about not being able to express one’s self properly.
Where are these experts now? Are they accountable or have they shifted with the times and moved on to new academic bolt holes?
AERO says the evidence now points to writing skills also improving memory and understanding and not just in English but across other disciplines.
Anyone old enough to remember schools before the great deskilling began will only roll their eyes at these findings, when students took notes, wrote essays in longhand and were expected to string sentences together to form an argument.
Before tedious grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and spelling became redundant in a world where the idea was paramount and as long as you got the gist that would do.
Or the term digital natives took hold, consigning proven study methods to the dustbin in favour of keyboards, calculators, the cut and paste and screens.
Now the evidence is mounting that the benefits of technology in education, particularly at the primary level, have been overegged, undermining both the retention and understanding of knowledge.
The insidiously addictive impact of clicking and screen time has on developing brains is also becoming more apparent.
From a writing point of view, digital “tools” are not only annoying but unnecessary if you already know what you are doing. They rely on incompetence and cultivate dependence.
The rapid rise of AI and its instantaneous, unreliable summaries and essays and style mimicry only makes it even more imperative that humans retain their individual voice and the skills to express it.
This is not about nostalgia or a rejection of technology but about its use being age-appropriate, having perspective and an understanding of its place as a tool, not a replacement for human endeavour.
AERO also plans to resurrect handwriting, saying it develops fine motor skills in young children. It could also add that handwriting engages the brain, stimulates creativity and helps students remember what they are writing about.
All power to AERO and a writing revival in our schools but there should never have been the need to rediscover its importance in the first place.
