The Good Old Gender Divide

No surprises with an article highlighting girls being ahead of boys in the NCEA stats.

Of course despite this trend in this country and other richer countries, girls are still spoken of as if they are some oppressed academic minority, which becomes glaring at university. I have mentioned this before in a post last year.

Me being cynical, I don’t think this will gain any mainstream traction until in about 20 to 30 years time. I predict it won’t be until then that we see stories about a missing generation of educated males. The so called man drought will be worse, with women competing for fewer educated males as it is still the case that the woman tends to  ”marry up” rather than the man.

The Decline of Handwriting

The Press has a story about handwriting. Or rather, the lack of it these days with the advent of computers, especially amongst boys.

My theory on how computers impact handwriting is nowadays the only place where handwriting is done by school students is at school. Handwriting is not associated with communication and literacy in general, but purely with school. Ask any student at school where they want to be, and you’re likely to get “anywhere but here” as a reply. School could easily be the only place where they write anything beyond filling in forms.

In times gone by, people wrote letters to each other by hand. One didn’t have to wait days for a letter to get to a friend, then some time for a reply. Nowadays we have email (even that is regarded as old school by some), instant messaging. Or one can avoid the written word altogether and have video conferencing in real time with skype, for example.

I also have something to put to those “back in my day, we wrote things by hand” rose-tinted glasses people. I would say, even “back in the day”, any official or otherwise formal letter would not have been handwritten, but typed. Unless it were something like Letters Patent which would have been done by a skilled calligrapher. And there weren’t that many of those. So if typing was an important skill, then one might have said back then if you had an easy way to produce typed documents, why wouldn’t you?